reposy
Fixing a hand in a photo
Hands are where photo editors go wrong most visibly. A finger lands at an angle no finger makes, a ring slides to the wrong hand, a fingernail grows out of a knuckle. Everyone can spot a bad hand, which is why the ones that work are worth describing carefully.
What people actually want fixed
A gesture
The sign you made in a picture you now want to send to your family. The fist that never quite closed. The peace sign with three fingers in it.
A finger
One bent behind another, one caught mid-move, one the camera gave an extra joint to. The rest of the hand stays put while it is corrected.
Nails
Length, shape, color. On the nails, not on the fingertip and not on whatever the hand is resting against.
What is being held
A glass, a phone, a cigarette. Removing a held object means saying what arrives in the space it leaves, or the hand ends up holding a smudge.
Why hands are harder than faces
A face has a fixed layout. Two eyes, one nose, and a model that has seen a billion of them knows where they go. A hand is a different shape in every photograph: fingers hide each other, the wrist rotates, and the number of visible fingertips changes with the angle. There is no canonical hand to fall back on, so a model filling in a whole frame will happily invent a sixth finger and see nothing wrong with it.
Fencing the edit helps here more than anywhere else. The mark you paint is where the change is allowed to happen; the sleeve, the ring, the background and the other hand are put back from the original file and then checked against it. A sixth finger inside the mark is a bad result you can retry. A sixth finger that rearranged the sleeve is a result that never reaches you.
How it works in Reposy
- Paint the hand. Or tap it and let the phone propose the area — it looks for hands and nails on the device itself and sends nothing anywhere. The brush is there if the guess is off.
- Pick a card. Change the gesture, fix the fingers, edit the nails, edit what is held. No text box, so there is no phrasing to get wrong.
- Take one result or three. Hands are the edit most worth asking for three of: three alternatives give you something to choose between.
Being honest about this one
Hand edits are the ones that fail most often. In our own testing, roughly one gesture change in three comes back wrong enough to retry — a finger in an impossible place, a thumb that went missing. That is why a result that never arrives is never charged, why the first edit is free, and why three alternatives exist at all.
The part that does not fail is the fence. A wrong hand is a wrong hand inside the area you marked; it does not take the sleeve or the ring with it.
Questions
Can it remove something from a hand?
Yes, and it is one of the edits that needs care: whatever is removed leaves a space, and the app has to say what belongs there. A cigarette between two fingers leaves a gap of background, not a smear.
Will my ring or watch survive?
Anything outside the area you marked comes back untouched from the original file. Inside the mark, a ring on a finger you are changing is part of what gets edited — so mark tightly if you want it left alone.
What if the new shape is bigger than what I marked?
A cup is wider than the phone it replaces, and fingers that open reach past the outline of a fist. For edits like these Reposy allows the new shape the room it actually takes, right beside your mark, and takes nothing else: what the model did not change is put back from the original, and the face is never part of that room.
Does it work on nails specifically?
Yes. The phone can find nails on the device and propose them as the area, and length, shape and color are separate cards.
How much does a hand edit cost?
The same as any other edit. The first one is free; after that the prices are shown in the App Store, in your own currency.