Yes, you’re confused. I understand. What does content aware image editing even mean? To be quite honest, who knows. But it works, so bear with me for a second.

If you’ve ever used any image editing tool, from Photoshop to Photopea, you might have noticed that it isn’t always easy to get the… easy stuff done. Say you have a picture of you in a red shirt, but you wish the shirt was blue— ideally, it should be as straight forward as selecting the shirt area and changing colours, but it isn't. Until now, anyway.

P.S. I made my own URL Shortener recently which has all been very exciting. What I mean by that is, ttl.fyi (short for the tech letter . for your information) now redirects to The Tech-Letter's homepage, and something like ttl.fyi/musclewiki would redirect to last week's tech-letter.

Facet is a content-aware image editor that translates technical image-editing-jargon into words all of us can understand. Facet understands the image you're editing, and breaks it down into pieces, so that editing it can be easier for you.

Everything is divided into layers; background, clothing, shapes, and even your face. Normally, you'd use an application like Photoshop to actually draw a "mask" around whatever section you're trying to customise-- whereas Facet makes it almost automatic, like in the image above. 

You can then style your selections as you choose, whether colour matching, adding filters, changing layouts, and so much more; plus, if you really like the way you styled one image, Facet can even apply the same styles to other images, automatically.

Take a look at what this image editing journey looks like.

For starters, here's Facet's canvas. I went ahead and added a picture of Lia, who is arguably the best dog.

On the bottom left you have all the masks; these are all the sections you could possibly edit, and they were automatically tagged by Facet after I uploaded my picture. These masks include "animal (dog)", "object (bed)", and so on. Please note, you are also able to edit these masks, delete them, or create your own-- it's very straightforward. 

If I hovered over any of these masks, Facet would show me my selection on the picture itself. Here's a GIF to show you what I mean.

Look at where my mouse goes (left hand side), what is being selected (the image itself), and a preview of just that selection (right hand side).

On the right hand side of the screen, you have the common editing tools you've probably seen in most image editing apps. Auto Adjust, for example, applies all the pertinent edits for you, automatically (for amateur editors like me, this is usually enough). On top of that, you have your usual colour, light, sharpen, blur features too, amongst others tools.

Once you select the mask you intend on editing, you're ready to make changes. Take a look at the following two images.

Though it takes a bit of getting used to, you get the hang of Facet quickly.

The first picture has the newly-added blur effect on all my backgrounds except on Lia, whereas in the second image I added the blur effect specifically on Lia. You can see this more in detail on the Layers section (left hand side) as well as Selection Preview (right hand side).

As mentioned earlier, you're able to add, edit, and delete masks. In the images below, upon selecting the "Hair" mask, only my head-hair was selected, I had to create a mask for the stache, so I could then edit this. 

If anything, I now know for a fact that I wouldn't look good as a blonde.

Facet makes it easy to do things that otherwise would take a long time to figure out. There's currently a waitlist to join Facet, but it's free to do so (took me only a week to be accepted). The free version includes image editing, real-time collaboration, and up to 10 private project (which means I can download them on my computer, but I can't share my public "Facet Profile" link unless I pay for a premium plan). You can only use Facet on your browser 

P.S. A few months ago I shared some NordVPN deals for Black Friday/Cyber Monday ("What is NordVPN?"). Lucky for you, it's their 9th birthday. If you buy a 2-year plan now (the price of 1 coffee a month), you automatically get either 1-month, 1-year, or 2-years extra for free. No catch-- just really depends on how lucky you are.