Turn off “Safety Filter” during “Clean Up” in Photos

Alright, I have a workaround!

It trades efficiency for effectiveness, but it's being consistent for my edits so far and gets the job done like the suddenly defunct retouch tool. (Apple, put it back!)

Select photo

Enter 'Edit' mode

Choose the 'Crop' tab

Zoom in to the area you want to touch up*

Choose the 'Clean Up' tab

Remove what you need to with the tool

Repeat steps 3-6 until all areas are touched up

Choose the 'Crop' tab

Zoom out to the full image

Why this works:

Although this isn't explicitly an Apple Intelligence tool it is absolutely utilizing AI to identify the contents of the photo as a whole before determining if your action will result in a retouch, a redact, or a safety filter being applied.

*By removing the surrounding context (i.e. zooming in until the "unsafe" imagery is no longer referenced within the frame), the tool can proceed with the intended retouch action.

[Edited by Moderator]

Many people think that it seems weird that you can't switch. It seems like Pixelate could just be a separate tool. You're right.

Of course, we here are not Apple; folks in this community are just users like you. And Apple engineers don’t read the stuff, here, so to let Apple know about this, go here:

Feedback - Photos - Apple

You now have to zoom in and crop out what the app is seeing. You actually have to complete the crop by pressing “done” and then on that cropped photo do the remove tool and the “safety filter” will not appear.

After removing what you wanted to remove, hit “done” again and then open the photo again-edit-crop, and undo the earlier crop.

fredfon wrote: … You now have to zoom in and crop out what the app is seeing.

Is this about the Mac or the iPhone? Actually, in either case, I find that I can zoom in on a picture in Clean Up mode (no Crop required) and clean up blemishes and dust spots on faces with no problem. If I zoom out and cover much of a face, though, then I it pixelates the face. I've used Clean Up on a Mac, and I've tested it on m iPhone. It all seems pretty reasonable, and so far, it has worked quite well for me without any multistep contortions.

I’m trying to remove a person with the cleanup on my iPad but I can’t because the whole person just becomes pixelated, but there’s another person on it who I can remove and it doesn’t become pixelated and if I remove them first, then he doesn’t get pixelated, but the other person who remove second doesn’t get pixelated, but if I remove the person, Who gets Pixelated First, then they get pixelated so…

Thanks so much! That worked 🙏🏻

Thank you so much!!! 😊