From the course: Photoshop: Tips and Quick Fixes

How do I remove an object or person? - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop: Tips and Quick Fixes

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How do I remove an object or person?

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- Photoshop offers several tools to make object removal quite easy. In the old days you'd use clone and stamp. But there's a newer tool for Content-Aware Fill that makes this much easier. What we can do is select something in the scene that we don't want. For example, let's take our quick selection tool here and just draw over our subject here, our photo bomber in the background. There we go. My suggestion is that you just expand that by a few pixels so it's a little bit bigger. Now Edit Fill gives you access to Content-Aware. And when you click OK it'll analyze the pixels and come up with new ones. In fact you can run that a couple of times and each time you run Content-Aware it will get more passes and more accurate. So this makes it very easy for example to select some of these distracting objects like the lawn chairs. And we'll get rid of these beach chairs from the scene. And with each pass it pulls them out. Now in this case I'm going to re-select that and you see how there's a thin border where the chair used to be. It's very important that after you make this selection you expand this by a few pixels so it has room to breathe. And you can feather it a small amount if you want so it can blend the results. Now as you run Content-Aware Fill it will do a great job of coming up with new pixels. And every time you run it it will give you slightly different results. Now if needed you can always go back to the traditional Clone and Stamp tools which will make it simple to select an area and then repeat the pixels if you want to clone those in. But the Content-Aware Fill options can really speed up the process. Now let's take a look at a different example. And in this case I want to remove some objects here pretty simply. Now besides Content-Aware Fill there are other content aware tools. So what you can do for example you can choose the Spot Healing Brush and make sure you try the Content-Aware option. Now by sampling all layers for example I can just paint over an unwanted object and it will analyze the surrounding areas and come up with new ones. Now sometimes this involves a few additional strokes but this can be useful to paint out unwanted areas. And by putting that on its own layer it worked quite well. Additionally, let's just throw that one away. You might decide that you want to be very specific. So there is a great tool here called the Patch tool. And what we can do is tell it to patch. You'll see there's controls for source and destination. So what I'm going to do is do this on the layer itself and just select the problem area. Now what I can do is drag to a new target zone and when I let go the pixels are selected and blended. So it's ultimately up to you. If you've got small distractions, this makes it very simple to lasso an area, choose a new target and release. And it does a great job of blending. So whether you want to use the Content-Aware Fill command or some of the brushes with content aware technology it's very simple to get great results.

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