Apple vs Adobe: One is Clearly Better at AI Photo Clean Up

Apple Photos added a new Clean Up feature that removes unwanted objects from photos, a tool that competes directly against the one that’s found inside Adobe products like ACR and Lightroom. So, which one is better?

This week, Apple pushed an update to macOS Sequoia (version 15.1) that adds the first batch of Apple Intelligence features that include the Clean Up tool in Photos, a generative AI feature that removes unwanted objects from images. Some of you might not have realized this tool was coming to desktop, as Apple typically showcased it in use on the iPhone. But for those of you who prefer editing images from a desk, Clean Up lives on macOS, too.

Outside of some flashy animations, Clean Up works pretty much identically to Adobe Generative Remove in practice, except for the fact it will offer suggestions sometimes on objects in photos it detects and thinks you might want to remove. Otherwise, it uses the same painting method that Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop users have come to know. Since Adobe just updated Photoshop and its Firefly AI model, we figured now was a great time to see how these two widely available removal tools fare against each other. So, we tasked both with removing the same elements of six different photos to see which performed best.

For each below, the beginning image is linked in higher resolution, and higher resolution versions of the two outputs from Apple and Adobe are also linked in the text above the comparison slider. We encourage you to look closely at them all and form your own opinions, but I also provide my insight on each result.

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