How many times have you thought you’ve captured the perfect picture from your phone, only to look at it after the fact to see an uninvited person or an object ruining the shot? We’ve all been there, right? It’s always that one person or that one kid in the background taking everything away from an otherwise beautiful photo. It could also just be an object that you didn’t notice was there before taking the shot, or it even could be a crowded beach or other touristy places where people won’t let you capture a clean shot.
You don’t have to worry about any of those uninvited guests in your images if you use a Samsung Galaxy device, thanks to the object eraser feature in One UI. Samsung’s Object Eraser tool allows you to edit and remove an object or a person from your image cleanly without leaving any smudges or other blemishes. It’s very similar to what Adobe does with its content-aware fill tool to remove an object and intelligently fill the background. Google’s Magic Eraser also does the same thing on the Pixel phones. Samsung’s Object Eraser was first introduced back in 2021 as a part of the company’s One UI 3.0 software and has improved a lot over the years.
If you have a Samsung Galaxy device that’s running One UI 3.0 and above and are wondering how to use the Object Eraser feature, then follow my step-by-step guide below to learn how to remove unwanted objects and people from your images.
- Open the Samsung Gallery app and select the image you want to edit.
- Tap the pencil icon from the menu to begin editing, and then select the three-dot icon in the bottom right corner of the screen.
- Choose the Object eraser option from the pop-up menu to start clearing your image.
- Simply tap the item you’d like removed or draw a circle around it, and then select Erase.
And that’s it. You’ll notice that the object or the person you were trying to remove from your image is now gone, and the Object Eraser feature has filled the background to make it look like it was never there.
The Object Eraser, I’d say, is pretty good at identifying and highlighting the person or object you’re trying to remove when you tap them. Of course, it’s not flawless and has issues detecting them, so I recommend drawing a circle around the items to remove them properly. I’ve noticed that marking an item to remove manually yields better results, as the auto-picker sometimes leaves the shadows behind. It works very well for most, and it did a pretty good job removing the keycap from the sample image used above. Here’s a before and after comparison:
See how Samsung’s Object Eraser has clearly removed the ‘F’ keycap from the image on the right? Your results may vary based on the image and the object you’re trying to remove, of course, but it should be able to produce some good results. Here’s a particularly tricky shot in which the Object Eraser managed to remove a bunch of people from the photo:
Erase shadows and reflections
Samsung’s Object Eraser feature, as you can see, also gives you two buttons to remove shadows and reflections from your image. They’re pretty self-explanatory, but neither of them managed to impress me with their results. Here, take a look at how the “Erase reflections” treated my sample image:
Notice how the feature reduced some of the reflections on that pack of the coffee grind? The edited image on the right is definitely more clear, but it could’ve been better. Now take a look at how the results produced by the “Erase shadows” feature below:
I’d say it has done a pretty good job of removing the shadows, but it’s not a flawless result by any means. You may see better results with other images, but I believe Samsung needs to refine these two a bit more.
Samsung Object Eraser: Final thoughts
Overall, though, I’d say the Object Eraser is a fantastic feature that works as advertised for the most part to remove all the unwanted people or objects from your images. I was quite surprised to see some of the results produced by Object Eraser. In fact, I even think it’s as good as — if not better than — Google’s Magic Eraser. I suggest you stop by my Google Magic Eraser vs Samsung Object Eraser comparison to find out which one’s better. Keep in mind that this particular feature is exclusive to Samsung devices running One UI 3.0 and above. You can use it to treat images that were captured using other devices, but the feature itself only works within the Samsung Gallery app on a compatible Galaxy device.