Review: Aiarty Image Matting – AI-based Background Removal & Up-Scaling for Stills

NOTE: Please read my product review disclosure.

“Aiarty Image Matting is an AI-powered image background remover. It is designed to precisely remove backgrounds from images for natural blending with new backgrounds. It excels at matting complex images with hair, fur, semi-transparency, indistinct edges, or low light. It is fast, accurate and easy to use, perfect for e-commerce, photographers, designers or casual users looking to save time with batch image processing.”

That was the opening pitch from Monica, Marketing Specialist at Aiarty.com. Well, that certainly got my attention. While Aiarty has a free-trial version, Monica sent me a license code so I could take a closer look at the complete app.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Aiarty Image Matting is a stand-alone, AI-based, background removal and upscaling utility for Windows or Mac that accesses AI models on the web, but runs all AI processing locally.

It is a step beyond the subject selection and background removal in Photoshop. While this works only with stills, video editors and, especially, documentarians can benefit from using it for processing stills.

The AI was trained on 320,000 4K still images, which hopefully means they curated these images to reduce hallucinations in the finished results. (I could not find a reference on their website as to how the software was trained, nor their privacy policy.)

Here’s an example. Notice the background flowers were replaced by black on the right, yet all the hair and costume detail was retained.

No software tool works perfectly all the time. The big challenge any AI system faces in removing the background is deciding what’s background and what’s the subject. That’s not always easy, as this poor girl with a suddenly missing leg and shoe attests.

Still I was very impressed with the speed and selection quality of AIarty. It includes tools for manually selecting what part of an image to process, burn and dodge tools to adjust exposure, brush and erasers to adjust boundaries between foreground and background.

There’s also upscaler and cropping tools built in. Images can be upscaled to 2X. Images can be exported individually or in a batch. Batch processing is a huge time-saver if all images were shot under similar conditions – like a photo studio – and you want to remove all backgrounds behind them.

Digiarty Software offers a 7 day free-trial and more details on its website. The free trial does not support batch export and single image exports will contain a watermark.

Developer: Digiarty Software
Product: Aiarty Image Matting
Website: https://www.aiarty.com/ai-image-matting/
Price: $109 (on sales now for $75) One-time purchase, no subscription.
Free 7-day trial available.

INTERFACE

The interface is very similar to Topaz AI. A preview panel with a slider that compares Before & After. Settings panel on the right and tools (Move, Brush, Eraser, Burn, Dodge) on the left. The Move tool shifts the position of the foreground or background.

Drag one or more images from the Finder into the tray at the bottom – or click the Plus icon to open a file picker dialog – then click an image in the tray to load it into the viewer in preparation for matting.

Click the start button. Two things then happen:

• The software contacts a server on the web to download the appropriate AI model. Downloads take less than ten seconds.
• That AI model is then processed locally – no images are uploaded – to create the mask.

NOTE: These masking results are cached so if you change to a different image, then come back to the original, you don’t need to redo the masking process.

The actual rotoscoping of a 4K image, running on an M2 Max Mac Studio, takes less than five seconds. The image is then displayed as a before (on left) and after. Here, I also changed the color of the temporary background on the right to green to more easily show the selection results.

NOTE: All changes are non-destructive. You can play with the settings forever. Go ahead. It’s fun.

There are four different AI models to choose from. Most of the time, the system picks the correct one automatically, but you can also choose one from this menu.

• AlphaStandard V2 provides better semi-transparency, better hair, better blending foreground and background.
• AlphaEdge v2 is similar to Alpha Standard, but with more edge sharpness and less transparency.
• EdgeClear v2 provide high-precision, better edge and sharpness, better detail preservation.
• SolidMat v2 is better for solid objects, such as bags, cars, shoes, buildings and so on.

Each time you change the menu, a different model downloads and you need to re-process the image.

Even older – really older – images can be processed, but the edges may need some cleanup with the brush (to add) or eraser (to remove) parts of the mask. The image above shows settings for the eraser.

TRANSLUCENCY

One of the strengths of Aiarty is its ability to handle translucency, meaning seeing through the foreground to elements in the background.

Notice how shades of the blue background on the right – which I added – are glowing through the translucent sections of the jelly fish.

EXPORT

Once the matte is created, you have two options:

1. Add a new background into the image using Aiarty
2. Export the foreground image and composite it in Photoshop, or other image editing program, and adding a background and adjusting images there.

To add a background:

If the Background icon is not showing, click the Star icon in the lower right corner to reveal it.

Click the Color picker (right) to change the background color. Click the Background button (left) to reveal existing images,

Select on the three supplied backgrounds or browse for the background image you want and select it.

NOTE: Background images can be cropped or repositioned. But they cannot be smaller than the foreground image.

Here, I added a color image behind our happy couple from 1905. However, as you may notice, there are, ah, exposure differences between those two images.

For a lot more image control, it makes more sense to export the foreground image with an alpha (transparency) channel, then composite it using Photoshop or Pixelmator.

In the above image, I’m showing translucency, along with the Move controls for foreground and background. This composite is displayed in Aiarty.

EXPORT

In the lower right corner, you can set export file settings and choose whether to export a single image or a batch of selected images.

Aiarty exports three files:

• The original mask image
• The processed image with new background
• The image with the background removed

All of these default to PNG 8-bit, but you can also select PNG 16-bit and JPEG. (Use PNG if you want to composite the image in an image editor.)

NOTE: To composite in Photoshop, open the background image, then drag the exported processed image on top of it. Adjust until you are happy.

SUMMARY

I am very impressed with AIarty. It is both well designed and well executed. It is fast, with all the common tools you need to create outstanding masks. It isn’t perfect, it struggles when edges are too blurry or close in texture to the background. But it can do an amazing job with hair or fur.

I also especially appreciate that it does its work locally. I don’t have a problem downloading AI models from the cloud. But I am grateful I don’t have to post my images up there, too.

Give the free trial a test and see what you think.

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