Apple’s iOS 16 ‘Lift and Drop’ Photo Feature Looks Impressive
Apple’s iOS 16 for its iPhones is coming later this year, and one feature in particular looks just as impressive as Apple promised it would be back in June: the “lift and drop” capability, otherwise known as Live Objects.
Live Objects is part of Apple’s Visual Look Up enhancements that it announced as part of iOS 16 back in June. The Silicon Valley giant has put significant resources into making Visual Look Up even more powerful and intelligent and is expanding Live Text, which is the ability for iOS to recognize text in photos (and now in videos in iOS 16), as well as expanding it to work with objects in photos.
Live Objects takes the same idea as Live Text and applies it to subjects in Photos. Users can long press on a subject, such as a person or animal, in a photo and iOS 16 will automatically cut out that object and allow it to be copied and pasted into whatever the user wants, such as an iMessage.
The feature erases the background and masks the subject out nearly instantly and, according to those who have had hands-on time with it, does a surprisingly good job.
YouTuber Marques Brownlee demonstrates the feature in a video shared on July 11 and says that it seems to work on any type of photo and with a wide range of objects. He is able to lift a dog, a golf club, a portrait of a person, and a car nearly instantly with just a single finger. He says that it seems to be able to do this with any object as long as it has a reasonable separation from background objects.
It isn’t perfect, of course, and seems to have some issues with separating hair from a background — a common problem even with advanced masking tools.
The demonstrations Brownlee shows in his video above are pretty much in-line with what Apple showed during its press conference in June, which means that feature actually might live up to the expectations the company set.
iOS 16 is currently in Beta but will be released to the general public later this year, likely in the fall if Apple keeps to its typical annual release schedule.
Image credits: Photos by Apple.
