Using Photoshop's generative AI tools to remove distractions and unwanted objects from a photo

Powered by Adobe Firefly, Photoshop’s generative AI tools help with creating new images from text prompts, adding and removing objects in photos, removing distractions like power lines and other unwanted objects from an image, generating new backgrounds for an image, and more.

The following exercises will give you the opportunity to work with Photoshop’s generative AI tools. Many of these tools are accessible through the Contextual Task Bar, which is shown in the following image:

The Contextual Task Bar shows different options, depending on what tool we have selected and what layer we're working with in the Layers panel. Photoshop will display options that it thinks will be helpful to us as we perform various image editing tasks. For example, in the screenshot above, we have options for selecting the subject of a photograph or removing the background from an image, but if we were to make a selection using one of the selection tools, we may see options for masking the selected area or using Generative Fill to add an object to the image we're working with. 

Many of the generative AI tools we'll work with today are accessible through the Contextual Task Bar, so we’ll need to display the Contextual Task Bar if it’s not already visible. Let’s turn it on now.

With the Contextual Task Bar visible, we can start editing the first photo.

Removing distractions and unwanted objects from a photo

In this exercise, we’ll be working with the following photograph of a sunset:

For this photo, we want to remove the electrical towers and power lines visible in the image so we can focus on the sunset. There are a few tools that will help us do this – Remove Distractions and Generative Fill. 

Let’s go ahead and open the file Sunset.jpg, then save the file as a Photoshop document.

Now that the file is open, we’ll start by using the Find distractions option of the Remove tool to remove the power lines in the photo. This will save us some time in editing the photo, as we won’t need to manually remove each power line from the photo. The Remove tool is grouped with the Spot Healing Brush tool, so we’ll need to display all the tools grouped with the Spot Healing Brush in order to activate the Remove tool. Once the tool is active, the Find distractions option will appear in the Options bar at the top of the screen.

NOTE: Using the Find distractions tool may not work well on older operating systems or computers with less than 16 GB of RAM. For more information, read the section “Minimum and recommended hardware environment for the Remove tool” on the Adobe Help page for the Remove tool. 

The wires are removed from the photo – now we can focus on removing the electrical towers. We’ll use the Selection Brush tool in combination with the Contextual Task Bar to complete this process.

The Selection Brush tool allows us to make a selection by painting a colored overlay over the area we want to select. We can change the brush’s size as needed to make it easier to select the object. Once we’ve made a selection, we can then use the Contextual Task Bar to generate new content to fill in the selected area. Typically this involves writing a prompt indicating what we want to generate to fill the selected space; however, if we want to remove something, we can either type “remove” in the prompt field or leave the field blank. For this exercise, we’ll leave the prompt field blank.

Let’s activate the Selection Brush tool, then remove the big tower in the middle of the photo.

Once the tower has been removed, we can look at different versions of the generated content by looking at the Variations section of the Properties panel:

Clicking on a variation here will show a different version of the generated content. For the object we just removed, the variations are subtly different, but for other generated content, the differences between variations may be more obvious.

On your own: Selecting and removing the other towers near the bottom of the image

To finish work on this image, you’ll select and remove the remaining electrical towers and poles that appear at the bottom of the image, along with any other objects we want to remove from the skyline.

1. Using the Selection Brush tool, select the first tower you want to remove.
2. Use the Generate Fill option in the Contextual Task Bar to remove the selected tower.
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 with the remaining towers until they’ve all been removed.
4. Save and close the file.

The following accordion fold contains an example solution for this exercise: