Samsung phones' best photo-fixing tool just got upgraded, and is coming to more devices

Banish unwanted things from your photos – shadows, reflections, gurning friends and more with this great Samsung phones upgrade

Samsung Galaxy S21 FE camera
(Image credit: Samsung)

If there's one thing I'm jealous about on some of the best Android phones, it's the Object Eraser that shipped with the Galaxy S21 series and the Google equivalent, Magic Eraser, that's in the Pixel 6. And now I'm going to be even more jealous because Samsung is making its version of the feature even better and adding it to many more devices.

If you're not already familiar with Object Eraser, it uses very clever processing to erase people and/or things from photographs – bad news for photobombers but brilliant for those times when you've taken a photo and there's one annoying thing spoiling it. The latest version takes everything good about the feature and adds some more cool tools to make it even more useful.

It's a kind of magic (eraser)

As 9to5Google reports, the feature – which you can get via the Samsung Gallery app – is being updated to add some useful new features. The first enables you to remove unwanted reflections, which is great if you've accidentally captured yourself in someone's sunglasses or captured someone else in a window, and the second enables you to use shadows. 

In addition to the new features, there's new hardware support too. Object Eraser is now available for the Galaxy S10, Galaxy S10+, Galaxy S10e, Galaxy A52 and Galaxy Note 10.

As ever with tech firms it's important to temper your enthusiasm with these kinds of features: in my experience they tend to either work absolutely brilliantly or really, really badly, and there's rarely any middle ground. But it's a fun and potentially very handy thing to have, and I wish I had the same option on my iPhone 13.

Carrie Marshall

Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series. When she’s not scribbling, she’s the singer in Glaswegian rock band HAVR (havrmusic.com).