Review: Cut Me Out Pro is a clever but imperfect way to manipulate a photo

Actual Cut Me Out Pro image at 100%. That’s all you get….

Cut Me Out Pro ($1.99) lets you place an object or a person and paste it into a background picture. It’s the opposite of some apps that let you remove a person from a photo. This lets you add them into another background, say, putting your girlfriend or boyfriend in front of the Eiffel Tower or the Grand Canyon.

Using Cut Me Out Pro

You start by choosing a background. It can be anything in your camera roll, or the app provides some nice backgrounds too. Load the background, then load a photo from your camera roll. Using your finger, cut it out to get as close to the person’s outline as possible. Then insert the photo on top of the background, and using the erase toll, get rid of any background on the interested picture you don’t want. The eraser cursor is adjustable in size, and you can zoom into the photo.

The insert can be resized, rotated of flipped (mirror imaged).

Then export the finished photo to your camera roll, email, Facebook or Twitter. The app has funny stickers you can add, and also text can be put on any photo, but generally I’m more interested in the quality of the photographic effect than the junk you can put on them.

The Downsides

To my mind, this app is a little rough. While there is a basic help file, it doesn’t walk you through the steps of making the composite. There is a YouTube video that makes the process a bit more understandable on the developer’. You add a new foreground photo with the ‘crop’ command, which is hardly intuitive. I also expected some kind of flatten command to bring the two layers together, but there isn’t one. When you export the photo, it’s flattened.

I’d also like to see some tools dedicated to matching the inserted photo to the background. Some apps provide exposure and saturation adjustments. I’d also like to see some sharpening filters. The ideal app would use some edge detection algorithms to make this a lot easier. With Cut Me Out the eraser tool is under your finger, so you can’t really see what you are erasing. A smart update would be be to offset the cursor making the process a lot easier. Thankfully, there is an undo command, so you can always start again if you have gone too far.

The app works in portrait mode only, and I would have preferred a landscape option, especially on the iPad. Photos are greatly reduced in size. A background image I imported that was 3110 pixels wide was 310 pixels wide when I exported it. That’s pretty severe. In fact, a cropped screenshot will give you higher image quality.

The Bottom Line

There are some other similar apps, also free. CutNPlace and Cut Me In have similar functionality.

Ultimately, practice makes perfect, and the app can do the job if you aren’t too picky about realism or image quality.

Cut Me Out Pro requires iOS 7 or later. It’s optimized for the iPhone 5, but at least, not yet, the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.

App Store link: Cut Me Out Pro – Easy photo editor to Chop photo, superimpose or erase background – P Venkateswara Rao

– Mel Martin