Microsoft is finally, fortunately, reinstating the Spot Fix feature in Windows 11’s Photos app.
I’m mildly obsessive about the Photos app. I’ve been enraged you could’t use Paint3D’s Magic Select software to edit out backgrounds. I’ve fumed at Photos’ instability, mildly praised Microsoft for fixing it, then puzzled why there are two Photos apps in Windows — and that the previous one is higher.
But the one feature that I’ve come to depend on (and that Microsoft eliminated!) was the Spot Fix software. And it’s finally coming back.
I don’t care that Microsoft is simply including this back to the Microsoft Insider Dev and Canary channels — the channels that Microsoft says don’t essentially assure that the code will find yourself in each customers’ fingers. I’m simply glad that Microsoft is no less than bringing it back.
What is Spot Fix? It’s nothing you could’t discover in Photoshop, with its Heal software and the power to “stamp” backgrounds onto a portion of the picture. All Spot Fix does is take a small round area (the dimensions is adjustable), use AI to search for anomalies, after which erase them. It’s fast, easy, and oh so necesaary to my workflow.
Why? Because any assessment of a laptop computer or a Thunderbolt dock contains images, and any photograph taken with a smartphone digital camera exposes mud and filth. Simply utilizing the product as one is speculated to typically provides a tiny quantity of mud, which is revealed by a smartphone digital camera if not my weary eyes. While touching up a photograph isn’t at all times mandatory or fascinating — typically it’s good to indicate how simply a laptop computer can entice fingerprints, for instance — there are various instances the place it simply tidies up the picture.
Photos’ Spot Fix helped me do this, simply as simply as I can spotlight a phrase or phrase and delete it in Microsoft Word. And who desires to pay a subscription charge to Adobe simply to do a fast touchup that Microsoft can do? That’s Spot Fix in a nutshell.
(My second favourite feature in Photos is Auto Enhance, which merely makes use of AI to enhance your photograph. It generally is a little heavy-handed, and fewer necessary as smartphone cameras have improved, but it surely’s nonetheless an incredible one-click touchup feature.)
The imminent Photos replace additionally contains some attention-grabbing new options: a brand new slideshow expertise, and an improved timeline view.
Microsoft
The new Slideshow assumes that you simply’ll need to view your images in Photos, making it a presentation in addition to an enhancing app. Slideshow does one thing that Google Photos has finished for years — when you’d like, you possibly can create a small montage of images, full with kinds, animations, and even audio. It appears to be like sharp.
Microsoft is additionally re-introducing the timeline scrollbar to the All Photos, OneDrive, and iCloud Photos gallery views which teams images by 12 months and month, Microsoft mentioned. (You would assume this is able to be a fundamental a part of Photos already, however, once more, this is Photos.) “With the scrollbar, you can now easily jump to any point in time and find the photos you want,” the corporate mentioned in a weblog publish.
Either manner, I’m simply glad that my Photos app is back to one thing to what it could and needs to be.
Author: Mark Hachman, Senior Editor
As PCWorld’s senior editor, Mark focuses on Microsoft information and chip know-how, amongst different beats. He has previously written for PCMag, BYTE, Slashdot, eWEEK, and ReadWrite.
…. to be continued
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