From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Removing distracting elements - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Removing distracting elements

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- [Instructor] There's several ways to remove distracting elements and unwanted objects in Camera Raw using the healing panel. I'm going to open both this waterfall file as well as the ice in the ocean by selecting them and using command R on Mac or control R on Windows. We'll start with the waterfall, and then I will select the healing panel. There are three different healing modes, the content aware mode, the healing, and the clone. So the clone will give us an exact copy of an area, and it's great when you're working with patterns or if you want to make a copy of something like a bird. In this case, let's say I want to make a copy of the rock. I can use the size slider to get a little bit larger of a brush, and I'm going to set the feather maybe to around 35 or so. I want to make sure that the brush is larger than the rock, so I'll actually use the right bracket key to just enlarge it a little bit more. Now in this case, I would start not by clicking on the rock, but actually on where I want the rock to be, because if I'm going to make a duplicate, I need to know where I'm going to put that duplicate. So let's say I wanted to add a copy of the rock right over here. So I would click, and then Camera Raw would find the spot to sample from, but it's trying to actually hide this area. So let's show the overlay and see where it selected from. We can see this is what it's drawing as the source. So I'm just going to reposition the source right over that rock, and now Camera Raw will duplicate or clone that rock right over to here. And if I needed to, I could go ahead and soften those edges even more, just adding a little bit more of a feather to blend that in. So that's the clone tool. It's great whenever you want an exact duplicate, but for now, I'm going to tap the delete key in order to remove that, and I want to move on to the healing brush. So it's similar to the clone in that it samples from another area of the image, but then it adjusts the tonality of the sampled information to evenly blend the retouched area. So this is great for removing distracting things, like dried flowers or sticks in this image. So I'm going to zoom into maybe 50%, and then I'll hold down the space bar in order to temporarily access the hand tool and reposition it so that we're looking at kind of this area here with this stick that I want to remove. So I'm going to decrease the size of the brush and also decrease the feather, and then we can just paint right over that stick. We can see that Camera Raw is sampling from this area, but of course, we could reposition that as needed. And I can toggle on and off the overlay by either checking the box or by just tapping on the V key. So that looks good. Let's go ahead and scroll up a bit. Maybe we think this area is distracting, so I'll use the left bracket to get a smaller brush, and drag over there. And then I see this area up here where the stick is. So I might do this in two. I'll do one above the leaf and one below it. This is a little distracting, too, this color here, so I'll remove that. Now, if I don't like the results, I can always tap the refresh and Camera Raw will go out and sample from a different area. So I'll tap V just so we can see what's happening. Every time I tap refresh, we can see that the source point is moving. Alright, I'll tap V again, and then let's take out the stick right up here, and I'll tap V 'cause I don't think it did a good job. Now, it picked from this waterfall, so I'm just going to scoot that over. Alright, let's go ahead and fit in window, and I see there are these two areas right down here with the branches, and I want to remove those as well. So I can tap the Z key. That'll give me the zoom tool and we'll just zoom into there and then use the space bar to reposition that. Now I have to put the zoom tool back, so I'll tap Z again, and now we get the cursor for the healing, and we're going to take a look at the Content Aware move. So that's the third option, and it removes objects using Adobe's Content Aware technology. So instead of sampling another area from the image, it's going to compare nearby image content and make up or fabricate completely new information to replace that unwanted area. So I'll get a little bit larger of a brush using the right bracket key, and then let's paint over this area right here. Alright, I like those results. Let's go ahead and get rid of this as well. So I'm going to drag and paint kind of in a sweepy motion over that as well. Alright, I'm going to tamp the V key just to hide that and make sure there aren't any edges. There's one kind of bright spot right here that I don't really like, so what's nice is when you hide the overlay, you can actually paint multiple times in the same area in order to heal or adjust an area, even though that area underneath has already been changed. Alright, let's move to the ocean image. Sometimes it's difficult to see dust spots on the sensor in an image, but you can see them when they're printed, so I will enable this option to visualize spots, and I can use the slider in order to change the threshold or the contrast area where I either see black or white. And as I move this way over to the right, we start seeing all of these little spots in the sky. So let's zoom into there. I'll tap Z, click and zoom in, and let's hide that visualized spot. And while they're very difficult to see, I can still see there's one here, there's one here, there's one right down here, and like I said, I probably would have missed these and then sent this to the printer, and I probably would have been able to see it when they were printed. So I'm going to click visualize spots again, tap Z to get rid of the zoom tool, and now I can just heal over these areas. I'll scoot down. In fact, let's set this to zoom to 50% so that I can just see a little bit more of the area. Looks like there's something there, in here, all these little areas in the sky that have these little dust spots. And these are dust spots on my sensor, so it looks like it's time for me to also clean my sensor. Get a little bit smaller of a spot there and a little smaller there, then we can go ahead and fit in view and toggle off the visualized spots. Alright, two tips before we wrap up. If we show the overlay, if there's a spot that we want to get rid of, well, if it's active, meaning that it's blue, we can just tap the delete key, but we can also hold down the option key on Mac or the alt key on Windows, and then drag over spots to delete more than one spot at a time. And if there was something like a wire in this image or maybe this area right down here, I can get a large brush, click once, and then hold down the shift key and click again, and Camera Raw will draw a straight line between the first click and the second click. Alright, let's click done to save our changes. So the next time you need to remove distracting elements, be sure to try the three different modes in the healing panel in Camera Raw, the clone, healing, and Content Aware, and check for those subtle dust spots using the visualize spots option. So the next time you need to remove distracting elements, be sure to try the three different modes in the healing panel in Camera Raw, and be sure to check for those subtle dust spots using the visualize spots option.

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