Patch: Smart PortraitE ditor
An attempt to emulate iPhone 7 Plus portraits
Free (with IAP) Developer Henry Lee, patch.photos Platform Universal Requirements iOS 9 or later
If you’ve not made the leap to the iPhone 7 Plus yet, but are keen to achieve stunning portrait photos with blurred backgrounds, here’s an app that could help – Patch: Smart Portrait Editor. It’s simple: you open the app, you pick your picture, it helps you select the subject to stand out of the background, and then you can save the result to your Camera Roll. You won’t be able to edit the photo’s colors, crop it down to size, or do any of the things that we normally associate with photography apps, though.
The auto-masking algorithm the app uses to detect what is the subject and what is the background worked pleasantly well and only required us to do a little bit of manual touching up. Unfortunately, the manual masking tool can be a little difficult to work with, especially on smaller images. The size of the brushes are very limited and Patch doesn’t allow for a lot of zooming in. That being said, it does work, it just takes a bit of patience.
It’s not a terrible app, but it is very limited. We’ve already tried other apps that give you a little more control and don’t attempt to put a pay-to-remove watermark on your images. Still, if you’re new to the game, we think that it’s not a bad app to try out if you want to emulate the DSLR-like background blur of the iPhone 7 Plus’s Portrait mode.
the bottom line. While novice photo editors might like it, Patch will be too simple for hobbyist photographers.