Exacto – Photo Cut
A more advanced image cut-out tool?
Exacto has one real aim: to bring a pen selection tool (very much like the one in Photoshop on desktop) for cutting out parts of an image to iOS. This isn’t an option in Photoshop Mix or Pixelmator. The latter app does have other selection options, but not this particular and precise tool, so Exacto looks to be a useful addition to a mobile photo editing suite. And it works… but not perfectly.
The way the pen selection tool works is that you tap around the outline of the subject you want to cut out, which adds End points. Each time you tap, you’ll add another End point, connected to the last by a dotted line, which is the cut-out. Between the End points are Control points, and these are key. You can move Control points to curve the line between End points, so by adding plenty of points, you can get a massively clean and precise cut-out line – more deliberate than any of Pixelmator’s cut-out options, though it’s much slower to do and requires more finesse.
Once you’ve finished polishing the cut-out line (you can easily preview it along the way), you can then remove either the inside or the outside of the selection. You can also create a new layer and cut out a separate object. Finally, you can export the cut-out image to another app, or save it to the Camera Roll.
The problems come in the little details, mostly. Exporting is much more awkward than it needs to be, and when we sent a multi-layer image to Pixelmator, it arrived in one layer regardless. Limitations in iOS sharing mean you can’t use multiple exports to get around this – you’d need to save each layer to the Camera Roll individually, clogging up your Photos app.
We also experienced a pretty annoying bug where End points were being added out of order, making it a chore to build our outline. The manual “+” button helped a bit here, but we were really slowed down. We also don’t like that you have to a tap a point to select it before you can manipulate it when using the Pencil (though this is sensible on iPhone). And we’d also like to see an option to feather our cut-outs’ edges in the future, to produce a smoother result.
the bottom line. An app that does what it sets out to do, but with some feature issues and small bugs. If these can be worked out, this could be a great tool.