From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

Brush away unwanted objects in Lightroom CC

From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

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Brush away unwanted objects in Lightroom CC

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- [Chris] Hello friends, this is Chris Orwig, and welcome to another episode of Photo Tools Weekly. In this week's episode, we'll be working with Lightroom CC. Here we're going to take a look at how we can Heal or Clone away unwanted issues or objects in our photographs. All right well, with this particular image there are three things that I want to get rid of. I want to get rid of this little plant over here, the cup on the ground, and this plant on this side. Well to do that, we want to use the Healing Brush or Healing Tool. Press the H key to access it or just click on this icon right here. Now before we actually fix those issues, I just want to show you how this works. We have our Size control. We can increase the Feather, which adds a little bit of softness around the edge. And Opacity, well that's kind of like intensity. Next what you do, is you simply just click and drag over something. I'm just going to randomly drag over these plants here on this bench and then let go. Well, what will happen is, Lightroom will try to find a good area in order to cover up what was there. Here I can move this around by dragging this to a new spot. I can also change the type of function that's happening here. If I don't want to Heal, I can change this to Clone. What we'll see is it's now a one-to-one replication of that. It's not blending it at all. Another way you can change this, is by right-clicking or Control clicking. When you do that, it will open up a menu, which tells you hey, you can choose Heal. It also shows you some other things as well. One of the things, I don't know if you saw it, but was to press the Forward Slash key. When you press the / key, it tries to find a better area to do the retouching. You can keep pressing it and it's going to keep trying to find something to help out in order to remove that issue. Again, right-click or Control click opens up that menu. If you want to reset this and just get rid of it, you can go ahead and click on this as well. Now, sometimes when you're retouching you might go ahead and paint over something and you might find it kind of hard to tell if it looks very good because of this overlay graphic that we see there. Let me go ahead and zoom in so that you can see that a little bit better here. Let's move over to this area. Well, that zoom didn't really work, but can you see that little graphic, that little white line? Well, what we have there is that overlay graphic. If you find that distracting, press the O key, that hides the overlay, O for overlay. Or, press the O key again and it brings it back. Now another way that you can rid of this, is as long as this is active, just press the Delete key and voila, it is gone. All right, well what about changing the brush size on the fly? Well ] key makes the brush bigger, [ key makes the brush smaller. There are a few shortcuts, if you forget those, you can always use these sliders here. All right well, next you want to just go ahead and paint over the object you want to get rid of. Let go and it will auto sample a good area for you. Tap the O key to hide those overlay edges to make sure it looks good. Tap that again or press the O key again to bring that back. Go ahead and go over here to this area. It's going to auto sample. Wasn't the best area for me, so I'll move it over, maybe all the way over here. That might be kind of nice, and then let go. If I need to do some more retouching on top of that, I can, just go ahead and click and paint over that and then choose a new sample area. What I'm going to do is try to choose a nice area like that and do a little bit of Cloning, with some soft edges and a little bit less Opacity. You can sort of cover things up in this way and progressively build up the area that you're working on. Here you can see I'm doing this multiple times. I'm just Cloning over a little bit more texture from another part of the picture. All right, one more thing to do. This over here, I'll go ahead and click and drag over that planter, and then increase my Opacity. I'm going to do some Healing here, rather than Cloning. I think that will look better. All right, last little tip I have for you, if ever you need to retouch something away which is a straight line like we have right here. What you can do, is you can go ahead and click on one part of the object, hold down the Shift key, and click on the other part of the object and it will create that straight line retouching for you. In this case, I can then reposition this, just dragging that point around. Let go of it. I always like to evaluate without the overlay, so tap the O key that hides your overlay graphics, because that way you can make sure the edges look good. Tap the O key again to bring those back, and this one I don't really need it, so I'll tap the Delete key in order to remove that from this project. All right, once you've finish that, you can press the H key. The H key is the key which allows you to access your Healing Tool, and that just tucks it away so that you can evaluate your image, and then move on with your project. All right well, that wraps up this week's episode of Photo Tools Weekly. I hope you picked up a few helpful tips and I hope that you have a wonderful day today. I'll look forward to seeing you next time, bye for now.

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