Sometimes the best edit is removing something that shouldn’t be there. A stranger walking through your background. A power line cutting across a landscape. A trash can next to your subject’s feet. Until now, doing this on an iPad meant either clunky clone stamping or uploading to a cloud service.
Chromaform’s new Generative Delete tool changes that. Brush over what you want gone, tap Remove, and the area is filled to match the surroundings — textures, lighting, perspective, all of it. No cloud upload. No text prompts. No waiting for a diffusion model to hallucinate. It runs in 2–5 seconds per region, entirely on your device.
How It Works
Under the hood, Generative Delete runs LaMa (Large Mask Inpainting), a neural inpainting model developed by Samsung AI Center and published at WACV 2022. LaMa is purpose-built for mask-based removal — it uses Fourier convolutions to capture both local texture and global structure, which is why it handles large removals (full-person erasure, for example) far better than traditional clone or patch-based approaches.
Here’s what happens when you tap Remove:
1. Region analysis. The brush mask is analyzed to find each disconnected painted region. For each region, a crop is computed with 2× context around the mask — minimum 800px — so the model has enough surrounding information to generate a convincing fill. Overlapping regions are merged automatically.
2. Neural inpainting. Each crop is resized to 800×800 and run through the LaMa CoreML model in a single forward pass. No iterative denoising, no guidance steps — one pass, one result. This is why it’s fast: roughly 2–5 seconds per region on M-series hardware.
3. Compositing. The fill is upscaled back to source resolution and composited with a feathered edge, replacing only the brushed pixels. Everything outside the mask stays bit-identical at full sensor resolution.
4. Pipeline integration. The composited result becomes the new source image feeding the Vulkan pipeline. That means the erase persists through all subsequent edits — adjust exposure, change the film curve, export at full resolution — the removal is baked in. It’s undoable during the session, but it isn’t a re-editable layer.
Why LaMa, Not Stable Diffusion
We tried. Earlier builds of Chromaform included a Stable Diffusion 1.5 inpainting pipeline — VAE encoder, UNet denoiser, VAE decoder, the whole thing. It didn’t work well. The UNet alone is 1.6 GB, the 15-step denoising loop took 30+ seconds, and the output quality was unreliable. Diffusion models are extraordinary for text-to-image generation, but for mask-based removal — where you don’t want creative reinterpretation, you want the background to continue seamlessly — LaMa is the right tool.
LaMa’s Fourier convolution architecture gives it an unusually large effective receptive field, which means it can synthesize globally coherent structure (repeating brick patterns, consistent sky gradients, continuous fabric texture) from a single forward pass. The result looks like the object was never there, not like a neural network painted over it.
On-Device, Downloadable on Demand
The LaMa model is approximately 200 MB — too large to bundle with the app, but small enough to download once and cache. The first time you use Generative Delete, Chromaform offers to download the model. It fetches, compiles for your device’s Neural Engine, and caches locally. Subsequent uses are instant.
If the download fails (airplane mode, network interruption), partial files are cleaned up and the download is re-offered on the next attempt. No corrupt state, no orphaned files.
What You Can Do With It
- Remove people from backgrounds — brush over a passerby and the scene fills in behind him
- Clean up distracting objects — signs, cables, litter, anything you’d clone-stamp out on desktop
- Multiple regions in one pass — paint two separate areas, hit Remove, and both are processed sequentially with per-region progress
- Works at full resolution — the model processes at 800×800, but the compositing happens at your image’s native resolution with feathered blending
Try It Now
Generative Delete is available now in the latest TestFlight build. Join the beta and try erasing something from your next shoot.