From the course: Learning Photoshop

Hide distractions with the Remove tool - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Learning Photoshop

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Hide distractions with the Remove tool

“

- [Instructor] The Remove Tool in Photoshop is one of the most powerful retouching tools available in this program. It not only can remove general clutter and unwanted content, but it also has some one-click features for removing people that you don't want in your photo and for removing distracting wires and cables. So I'd like to show you all that in this movie. To start, I'll select the Remove Tool here in the toolbar. It's nested with the Spot Healing Brush tool. I'll select Remove Tool, and then I'm going to go over to the Layers panel where I'm going to add a new blank layer, in which I'll have the Remove Tool place the pixels that it creates to hide the content we don't want. I'll call this Remove, and I'll leave that layer selected. And then I'll go up to the Options bar and I'll make sure that Sample all layers is checked so that the Remove Tool can make use of that new Remove layer. Then I'll make sure that Remove after every stroke is unchecked, If this option were checked. then with every brush stroke that I make as I'm removing content, the tool would go about the work of removing that content. And I prefer to perhaps make multiple brush strokes before that happens and then trigger the tool myself. So I'm going to leave that unchecked. You'll see what I mean in a moment. And then importantly, I'm going to set the mode to Auto May use generative AI. If you click here, you can see that you have three choices. You can either turn generative AI on, in which case the Remove Tool will always use generative AI to remove content, or you can turn it off completely, in which case the tool will not use generative AI, or you can let the tool decide when it's necessary to use generative AI. And I found that very helpful, so I'm going to leave that turned on. It's one less thing for me to think about. I'll let the tool do it. Now, the first thing that I want to do here is see if the tool can remove the people in the image, except for the person in orange over on the right who's actually someone we know and a subject of this image. So I'm going to go to where it says Find distractions, and notice that it promises one-click removal of wires and cables and of people. So I'm going to click People, and it goes about identifying what it thinks are the people in the image that I would want to remove, and it highlights all of those people with a little red translucent overlay. And notice that there is no such overlay on this woman, which means that it's able to discern which people I probably want to remove and which people I don't, considering her as a subject of the image. That's pretty amazing in itself. Notice that it highlighted the people inside the tram, as well as the people on the sidewalk. I'd like to keep the people in the tram in the image. So in order to do that, I need to remove that red highlight, and that's done by going up to the Options bar and clicking on the Subtract from icon, or you can just hold down the Option key on a Mac or the Alt key on Windows and paint over the red highlight on these people. I'm going to make my brush tip bigger by pressing the right bracket key on my keyboard, as I've been doing throughout this course across multiple tools. And you can see as I paint inside the tram, the red highlight is removed from there. I noticed that it even found this fellow over here who's pretty much in the dark. I hadn't even noticed him, so that's how discerning this tool is. Now with the remaining people highlighted, I'm going to run the tool by coming up and clicking the check mark in the Options bar, and it just took a second to remove all those people. Terrific, so that's a really powerful feature. It comes in handy for any travel photos you have with lots of tourists in the background, or any time you're on the street or in a crowd, and a lot of people appear in your photos when you'd rather have a clean, clear view of whatever you're photographing. The other one-click removal that's included with the Remove Tool in this version of Photoshop that I'm using to record is a one-click removal of wires and cables, and there are plenty of those in this image for running the tram system. So I'm going to click Wires and cables here, and then I'll wait, and in just a few seconds, those are gone too. The little bit of time that it took was because the Remove Tool was probably using generative AI that time, and to do that, it has to communicate with the cloud. Now, you also can remove any general distractions using the Remove Tool. So for example, this apparatus that was part of the tram system, I can just drag over that manually. And because I had unchecked Remove after each stroke , it doesn't remove that immediately. I have a chance to remove some other items too before I run the tool. So I'm going to come over here, and maybe I'll get rid of this little trash can and this pole. And over here, I noticed a car poking out from behind the tram. And also because I turned off Remove after each stroke, I can use the trick that I've been able to use with other Remove Tools for a long time, which is to click on the bottom of something fairly straight, like this pole, and then not have to run my mouse over it, just go to the top, hold down the Shift key, and click up there, and that highlights the whole pole. And so that's a little bit of a time-saver too. And I'll get rid of this yellow pole too. Everything else looks okay. So I'll come up and run the tool again to show you that you can remove general distractions with this tool too. And I've tried this on very small items, like pieces of grass, as well as very large items, like a truck, with success almost every time. And there's the result. So I think you can see how powerful, how useful, and how practical the Remove Tool is, and that you'll give it a try on your own images.

Contents