Touch up a photograph, one tap at a time

What one tap does

You tap a place. The tool draws a disc around it, at a size it works out from the long edge of your file, and rebuilds what is inside that disc out of the picture immediately around it. Nothing is invented. Every value written came from somewhere else in the same frame, a few dozen pixels away.

Six of those per photograph. Then it stops, and says so. There is no pass number, no history to scrub and no stack of layers — the placed fixes are a flat numbered list, and removing one takes it out of the list.

A tap cannot remove a person, a sign or a car. It fills a small disc from what surrounds it. Put it over a face, a fence or a line of brickwork and it will smear, and you will see the smear.

The seam is there so that claim can be checked rather than believed. Drag it across and the same frame arrives twice, once as it came off the camera and once as it stands now, with a numbered tag wherever something was placed.

The four fixes

Keys one to four arm them. Escape disarms. With the stage focused the arrow keys walk a crosshair a pixel at a time, ten with Shift held, and Enter places the armed fix where the crosshair is standing. That is the whole tool without a pointer.

What is deliberately absent: hardness, feather, opacity, strength, a source point, a lasso, a rectangle, an editable mask, a layer list, a blend mode, and every control that applies to the whole frame at once. None of those is on a list to be added later.

What arrives and what doesn't

JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, BMP, TIFF and ICO are decoded by the browser itself. A HEIC — which is what a recent iPhone writes unless it was told otherwise — pulls a WebAssembly decoder down with it the first time one is opened, and at no other moment. Opening this page fetches nothing of the kind.

Past about thirty-two megapixels, or sixteen on an iPhone or iPad, you are offered a reduced working copy with two buttons of equal weight rather than being told no. Past a hundred, or forty on those devices, the file is turned away and the measured figure is printed in the sentence that turns it away. Files stop at 120 MB.

• A moving GIF or WebP is declined, because a tap fixes one frame and you would get one frame back.
• Transparency survives. A fill reads only from neighbours that are fully opaque, so a hole in a PNG does not come back grey.
• A JPG carrying four print channels is converted by the browser on the way in, and the page says so, because the colours have already moved by then.
• Colour is handled as sRGB throughout. A Display-P3 file loses a little saturation on the round trip.
• Orientation is settled before the stage sees a pixel, using a two-by-one test image to find out whether this browser already applied the camera's flag.

Out comes a JPG at a quality you set between fifty and a hundred, sitting at ninety-two until you move it, or a PNG whenever the file you opened carried an alpha channel. The export replays the same six records against the full-resolution pixels rather than scaling the preview up, so the file you keep is the file you approved.

Questions people ask

Why will it not let me tap the same place twice?

Because a second pass over one patch is how a one-tap tool turns into a region tool. The fill gets one go at each disc. If one go was not enough, the answer is a different kind of program, not a second attempt here.

Where is the size control?

There is not one, and that is the product rather than an omission. The disc is the long edge of your file divided by fifty-six, held between fourteen and fifty-six pixels. Once a size can be dragged, so can a shape, and then a mask, and then this is a different site.

It said the thing was too big. What now?

The fill checks the ring of picture just outside the disc before it writes anything. When that ring still holds the thing you tapped, the thing carries on past the patch and one disc cannot close it. Nothing is changed when that happens. A region tool is the right instrument for it.

Is my problem in one place, or in the whole frame?

Drag the seam and watch the parts you did not tap. If the untouched parts look wrong too, the fault is global and taps will chase it forever. One spot, or the whole picture is thirty seconds on how to tell.

Does the photograph go anywhere?

No. There is no address on this page for a picture to be sent to. The file is decoded by the browser, each fix is written in the same tab, and the result reaches your downloads folder from memory.

What happens to the camera information?

When you open a JPG and save a JPG, the block the camera wrote is copied into the new file with one field corrected: orientation is set to upright, because the rotation is already in the pixels and a second one would turn the picture twice. A PNG is written without it.

Elsewhere in the family

This page holds one job and hands the rest over by name. None of the rows below is a link; they are here so nobody spends four taps on something another program does in one.