Removing unwanted objects from a photo

There may be times when we want to remove objects from a photo, such as a lone bird in the sky, a piece of trash from a photograph of a park, or scratches in a scan of a damaged physical photograph. Photoshop offers tools that can help us in removing these unwanted elements from an otherwise perfectly good photograph.

In the image we're working with, we can see a few elements we might want to remove from the photo. There are a few bubbles to the left of Angelica’s head that could be removed, and there’s a section of the patio visible on the right side of the photo with a patch of dead grass that we could fix as well. Let’s see how to use the healing tools to accomplish these tasks.

Understanding the content-aware healing tools in Photoshop

Many of the healing tools in Photoshop make use of a content-aware algorithm that works by looking at the content surrounding the area we’re trying to repair and comparing it to the content inside the area we’re working with. After comparing the content, Photoshop will then fill in the area we want to repair with color information based on the areas surrounding our selection. This results in a seamless removal of a scratch or object in a photo.

One thing to keep in mind when working with the content-aware healing tools is that the results aren’t always perfect. Sometimes Photoshop will fill in the selected area with unexpected results. If this happens, you can try adjusting the size of your selection and re-attempting the healing process.

Using the Spot Healing Brush tool to repair an image

Let’s start by removing the bubbles to the left of Angelica’s head. We’ll use the Spot Healing Brush Tool to accomplish this.

The Spot Healing Brush tool is often used to fix small blemishes, but can also be used to fix larger issues in an image as well. The tool uses Photoshop’s content-aware algorithm, and works best when the size of our cursor is slightly larger than the area we want to work with. This way, Photoshop has a better idea of what we want it to remove when using the Spot Healing Brush. We can adjust the size of our brush cursor in the Options bar.

We’ll start off by zooming in on the area we want to work with, then we’ll use the Spot Healing Brush to remove the bubbles and patch of dead grass.

The bubbles and patch of dead grass are now gone and have been seamlessly replaced with grass. Next, let’s focus our attention on the patio. We’ll use a different technique to repair this part of the image.

Using selections and Content-Aware Fill to repair a section of an image

One of the most common tasks you’ll perform in Photoshop is making a selection. A selection in Photoshop allows us to focus on one part of the image while leaving the rest unaffected. We can use selection techniques to isolate pieces of an image in order to repair, move, or replace just those parts. For example, later on in this course we’ll use a selection to separate an image of a little girl from the image’s background and place our selection into an entirely separate image. For now, though, we’re going to use the selection tools to select the corner of the patio that appears on the right side of the image.

Photoshop offers a variety of selection tools to suit different needs — for our purposes today, we’ll use the Rectangular Marquee tool to select the corner of the patio. Once we’ve made the selection, we’ll use Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill option to fill in the selected area with the grass we see in the surrounding area. 

When you let go of the mouse after completing the selection, you’ll see the selection represented by an animated, dashed-line border that’s commonly often referred to as marching ants. Your selection should look similar to the following image:

The marching ants border indicates that a selection is active, and any changes we make to the image will only be applied inside that border.

Now that we’ve selected the area to work with, we'll fix this part of the image using Content-Aware Fill. Content-Aware Fill works much like the healing tools, except that instead of clicking on or pressing and dragging over an area, we’ll use a command to heal the selected section of the image all at once.

Content-Aware Fill works best on problems that have a simple background texture behind them. The more information Photoshop has to pull from to recreate the background, the better the final result will look. The patio is a good example to work with, as it’s surrounded by green grass on all sides. We can easily replace the bricks with grass using Content-Aware Fill.

At this point, Photoshop will fill in the selected area with grass. We've finished removing the unwanted items from the photo, and it should look similar to the following image:

Next, we'll work on adjusting the lighting levels in an image. Before we do that, let’s save and close this image.