Transcripts
1. Remove Unwanted Objects and People from Photos in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, remove objects and tourists from photos in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at a grab bag of methods of removing unwanted objects from your photos. This will allow you to clean up photos and to get rid of things that you just don't want. We're going to focus less on completing a cleanup and a little bit more on the actual tools and what's smart to use and what's going to be fast to use. Now, as you're watching these videos, you're going to see a prompt which is going to ask you if you would recommend this class to others. Please. If you are enjoying the class and learning from it, would you do two things for me? Firstly, give it a thumbs up, and secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now let's get started removing unwanted objects from photos.
2. Pt 1 - Clone Stamp Tool: Before you get started fixing any image, you need to identify what it is that you are seeing as problems in that image. In this image, I want to fix the roof and these unsightly stains on the roof and I'd like to get rid of this garden furniture. We'll start with the roof. I'm going to make a duplicate of my background layer because some of the fixes that I would do to this image are going to involve actually changing the background layer but I want to keep an original version of the image just so that we can see how far we've come. Now, for the first tool I'm going to use, which is the clone stamp tool, it will actually sample other layers and will allow you to paint fix on a different layer, I'm going to add a brand new layer here and I'm going to put the fixes on this layer. With the clone stamp tool selected, I want to make sure that I have selected here all layers, that lets me sample through two layers beneath the layer that I'm working on. This is a really good idea, any tool that you can get to sample the layers below, but put the fix on a separate layer you should be using because it means that if you make a mess, you just delete this layer and start over. You haven't wrecked a copy of your image. With the clone stamp tool selected, I'm going Alt click on an area that I'm going to use to paint over, I'm going to use this as my paint if you like and I'm just going to click to paint down the tiles. I'll Alt click, sample some more tiles. I'm trying to get the tile line pretty even as I go, I am mindful that the little sample of paint, if you like, that I have inside my cursor here, I'm trying to line everything up. The brush I'm using is what was a hard brush, but I've just reduced the hardness to about 40 percent. I'm using the open and closed square bracket case to re-size the brush as I work and I am going to sample frequently, I'll Alt click here and just start painting, I'll come back here Alt click and get some more tiles to work with Alt click. Now, invariably, even if you're fairly careful about sampling frequently, you're going to get something that looks like a bit of a pattern in the roof. Well, once you've actually gone ahead and fixed the problems that you see, go back and take another sample and then just go and paint that sample over where you think you're seeing a little bit of repetitive tile work if you like and generally just a couple of hits with some extra tiles will break up the roof patterns and you just won't see them any longer. Again, I'm going to come in here and paint this out. We're going to Alt sample here and I can pretty much do a paint job with my brush here, I'm just going to Shift click down here to bring these tiles in. Click, Shift, click. That wasn't very successful. Let's try again here and just paint down the roof here, just painting the tiles. I'm mindful of where the little x is on my roof line because that's showing me the tiles that I'm using for my fix. Again, trying to not use something that is a repeated element or an obviously repeated element, you'll find that the light tiles are the ones that show up most on the roof line, if you're trying to hide something that looks repetitive, just go and sample something that's a little bit darker, and paint over the top and the repetitiveness is going to go away. This is what we've done to the roof with just the clone stamp tool. If you think that you've gone over the flashing here a little bit go to something like the eraser tool and in this case I'd be working with a slightly hard brush. It minds up about 90 percent. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to click here on the roof line and I'm going to Shift click down here and that's just going to get rid of any of the paint that spilled over into that gutter work there. In the next video, we'll come back and have a look at a different tool to use to get rid of some of this garden furniture.
3. Pt 2 - Patch Tool: Next up we're going to look at the garden furniture, So I'm just going to zoom into this area. With the zoom tool, I'm going to hold the space-bar as I just move the image up so I can see this area a bit more clearly. Now clearly this garden chair has a shadow with it as well, so when I clean it up, I'm going to clean up not just the chair, but also the shadow. The client stamp is not the tool of choice here, the tool of choice is probably going to be the patch tool and it shares a toolbar position here with the Spot Healing Brush and the Healing Brush Tool. I'm going to click the patch tool. With the patch tool, it works at this stage like the lasso tool. You're just going to lasso around the area that you want to remove. Now I'm making sure to go in the legs of the chair but I want to grab this piece of wall here because I probably need to replace it as well. If you've gone too far with your selection, hold down the Alt key and then just remove a piece from the selection, so I'm just going to remove this bit. I have a pretty good selection here with the patch tool, I have source selected here, and what I'm going to do now is just drag this across to find an area to use for my patch. What I'm looking for is to line the timber up on the building, so that's really important with this tool, with what we're working with here is to make sure that we line everything up. I'm just going to look at about this position. I'm looking at my vertical beams and everything is pretty well lined up, so I'm just going to let go the left mouse button, and this is the fix we had. Now with the patch tool, you have to work on the layer that has the content, you can't work on an empty layer unlike the clone stamp tool. Now there's a bit more work to be done here, so I may come in here again and select this area and see if I can find a patch for it. Again, this time looking for the vertical alignment on that timber work, and then just let go the mouse button. If I'm left with an area that I don't particularly like, well, then I can go and get the lasso tool. I'm just going to lasso this portion of the building, not really happy with the fix here, with that lasso, I'm going to choose select and then transform selection. I'm going to drag it to an area that I can use for the fix, so I'm going to take it to here. Once I've got this selection in place, I'm just going to click the check mark, and what I'm going to do is copy and paste this pace. I'll choose edit copy and then edit paste. Now the paste is springing that pasted element into a new layer, that's automatic in Photoshop, so you don't have to do it. Now I'm just selecting the move tool, the handle's up here and I can move it into position. Now, this part of it, its okay and this part okay, and this part it's not okay. Let's go to this layer that has this pace honored. What I'm going to do is add a mask, just click on the Add Mask icon. I'm going to paint with black and white, so I've got a paintbrush here and it's a nice soft paintbrush. It's got zero hardness and it's quite small. We're working with black paint, and I have my mask selected because it's got this little marker around it. All I'm going to do is just paint over the edge of the problem to blend it in and that nice soft brush, it's just going to blend the edges in nicely. It's pretty near seamless. Now let's have a goal at this pole here, and again we'll need to go back to the patch tool, will need to re-select this background lab because the patch tool is only going to work on a layer that actually has content in it, so selecting around this. If you need to add to the selection, just hold the Shift key as you add a little bit to the selection, Alt or Option will remove it. With the Patch Tool selected, we're just going to drag across to find an area to use for the patch. Again I'm going to try and line up the timber in the right position. When I think I've got a good match, I'll just let go the left mouse button and just click Away. Now the Timber could be a better fix, the timber because it's on an angle is always going to be a little bit difficult with these tools, but let's zoom in. What I can do is go and get a pace from right next door to use, so with this layer selected, I'm going to just select around here with the Lasso tool, because I know this is the selection that I want to make. I'll choose edit copy, edit paste. This will be sprung to a new layer, click the Move tool. With this copy, I'm just going to move it down into position. If I need to scale it down a little bit, I can just drag on its handle here, and same thing with a masters quickly add a mast to it. You've got black paint selected, click the paintbrush and we can just paint over the top here to remove any bit of this that we don't want. We can paint over the very edge here just to blend it in a little bit, and because of the size of the fix and the problem in that they are over this area of the building, you're probably not going to notice that anything has been fixed. In the next video, we're going to have a look at the special case of removing the chair here.
4. Pt 3 - Copy and Paste and Clone Stamp: The chair here is going to pose a little bit of a problem, because if we try to remove elements of it with the Patch tool by selecting this layer that has content on it, and just selecting, for example, around a leg of the chair. When I go to try and patch it, we get some bleeding of the chair into the fix. It's because we're not able to select the entire chair, because there's really not anything that we can use as a perfect patch here. What you might want to do is to go and get rid of the bits that you can as much as you can. Use the patch tool to get rid of as much of the chairs you can start off with, and then look at another tool to use for the rest of the chair. For the rest of the chair, probably some of this dark area up here will be a good fix, because you can see that it's starting to get dark in behind the chair. What I'm gonna do is I'm just going to select first of all, the layer that has content on it, and then let's go and get a big piece of this greenery to use for behind the chair. Now I'm aiming for the dark greenery because it's going to stand out a whole lot less than if I use the light stuff. I'm going to select it, I'll choose Edit, Copy and then Edit, Paste. That's going against bring it to a new layer. I'll click the Move tool and now move it down over the top of the chair. Now, it's too big a pace to use as a patch, but that's fine because I'm going to again go and use my mask. With this layer selected, just click the layer mask again, black paint, again, a soft brush. Again, all you going to do is just tip the edge of this area that you've just pasted in, just to soften the edge and when you soften the edge, you're going to blend it in with the area behind. Now if you go too far because it's a mask, that's fine. You can just go and paint with the opposite color. I've gone too far. I'm just going to paint with white, going to shrink down my brush a little bit and go and paint back in anywhere where the chair is showing. Now this point, you could also add a new layer on top, and then go and do a little bit of cloning. Go to the clone Stamp tool, make sure that your brush is a smallish size. Alt click on some of the content that you want to use, and then just paint over the area where you want to get this blended in effect. We might take some of this green gravel and just paint that in. Again, if you think that you've got too much or it's too obvious, the patch that you've made just grab a little bit of extra gravel and just paint over the top. Remembering that the lighter bits are going to be the most obvious bits, so if you get rid of the lightest bits, then it's not going to show so obviously that you've done a patch. Now here there are a couple of things that we could get rid off. Just a little bit of garbage. Alt click on an area to select it and then just paint over the bits that you want to remove to tidy it up. Let's just continue this concrete. At this point it would behave as to have a look and to say just how much work we've been able to do to this photo. To compare your before and afters. This is what I like to do. I'll choose window and then Layer Comps. Layer Comps allow you to set up your document to show a before and after, because of course we kept the original image and that's really important. Let's click on the new icon here, and let's call this Final, because this is as far as we're going with this image today. Now let's go and turn off everything except for the background layer, which is the original. I'll click here and we'll type Original then click "Okay". Now with our layer comps dialogue, it's going to be really easy for us to do a before and after log. This is the original here, and this is the fixed version of the image. You can flip between original and fixed to be able to see just what you've been able to achieve with these tools. With this, we've used the clone stamp tool, we've used the patch tool, we've used a simple copy and paste routine, and then just softening the edges with a mask, and also going over the edges with the clone stamp tool a little bit just to get a better fix.
5. Pt 4 - Spot Healing Brush: This image I downloaded from unsplash.com and I wanted to have a look with you at what you would do if you wanted to get rid of the wire fence here. Now, always with fixing images, you first want to determine what it is you want to remove and then you want to go for the simplest possible tool. In this instance, the simplest possible tool is the spot healing brush. It shows a toolbar position up here. It's actually generally the key tool that you're going to see. It's a spot healing brush Tool. You'll see here that it also has the ability to sample all layers. What we're going to do here is we're going to add a brand new layer to this document and we're going to put our fix on this layer because the sample all layers will allow us to do that. Again, we get a choice of brush, so I'm going to go for a reasonable size brush, but I don't want the hardness to be too hard because it's going to be easier to blend in here. I'm going to 50 percent hardness. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to paint over the wires that I want to get rid of. When I do that, the spot healing brush does a really good job of getting rid of the wires and just blending everything in. Then you can enlarge your brush if you want to. You do that with your open and close square bracket case, that's just fine. You can see here that we've got a bit of a problem, perhaps with the horses mane, but we can deal with that in a minute. When you're using a brush, you can also do a click, shift click if you've got a straight edge and you can remove it that way. If something doesn't work, then I suggest that you immediately undo it and go back and try again. It's not the sort of tool that you want to work too fast with. The slower you work, the more considered you work, the better job you're going to do. You can see it's made a bit of a hash of this part of the horse. What I would do at this point, since I'm working on this layer is go and get the Clone Stamp tool. I'm going to go and borrow a piece of horse hair. That's going in approximately this direction. I think this is a pretty good fix, so I'm just going to grab that and let's just go and pop it in. The Clone Stamp tool does have a feature for changing things around and rotating things, but really if you can get a piece of the image that you can use for the fix then just use that because those additional features on the tool are a little bit fiddly. Just try and get a better fix if you can, from just sampling, outsmart pace of the image, going to decrease my brush size here, click shift, click, click, shift click. Here I'm going to be really careful. I'm going to try and just wipe out as close as I can to the edge of the horses neck. But I'm not going to risk destroying the edge here. What I'm going to do at this point is go to my Clone Stamp tool because I've got plenty of horses neck here that I can use. I'm just going to alt click just on the very edge of the horses neck. It's going in the right angle. Everything is just perfect here for just painting that in. I'm going to do it up here as well. Again, re-sample this area so that we're getting a better tone, better color match with the neck of the horse and just come in and fix that up. Now if I've got other things that I need to fix up that easy to fix as well. At this point, I would probably try the spot healing brush because it's going to be the easiest tool to use. If it doesn't make a fix, then I would be looking probably at the Clone Stamp tool. But if you can get the spot healing brush tool to do the work for you, then it's obviously the quickest and best tool to use. The other places where you're going to have difficulty is going to be here in under the horse's neck where there's quite a bit of hair. But again, you'll just want to sample a piece of the horse's neck that has this hair and use it to cover this area up. In this case back to the client stamp tool, going to take quite a big piece with the client stamp tool. Let's enlarge the brush here, let's alt click about here. We're just going to paint this in remembering that we're on a separate layer. If we don't like the fix, it's very, very easy to remove it. I've done a pretty good job here around the horse's neck. Now I'm just going to go in and fix the rest of it with the spot healing brush tool. As soon as I can get back to the spot healing brush tool, I will because it is the easier tool to use. Here I've got a bit of a problem. I'm going back to my clone stamp tool because it's the best problem-solving tool. I'll alt, click here on a bit of the hair to use and just see if I can patch that in. Really good fix there. Same thing here. Horses lip, I've probably got enough content just here. In this area of the horses lip to use for this area, again, plenty of content to use for the nose, plenty of content to use here. With the work of just a few minutes, it's going to be pretty easy to get rid of this entire wire fence.
6. Pt 5 - Special feature of the Clone Stamp tool: Before we go further with other fixes that you can do to images, I just want to spend a couple of minutes on the clone stamp tool because there is an important setting with the clone stamp tool is going to have an effect on how things are cloned. I'm going to select the clone stamp tool. What I've done here is I've created a very simple image that just has four stripes over here. I'm going to click to add a new layer because we can sample from this background layer and paint over here. I'm going to hold my mouse pointer over this blue stripe here with my clone stamp brush. I'm going to "Alt", click on that area. That would be "Option" click on the Mac. I'm going to set aligned to be turned on. When I have aligned turned on and I paint with this, I'm getting my three stripes. But when I go and paint here, you can see I'm getting a red stripe. If I paint here, I'm getting yellow, and I'm painting green and blue. It all depends where I clicked first when I went to paint with the clone stamp tool. Now it's always going to be aligned to these original colors. I'm going to go back here now. I'm going to turn aligned off, and I'm going to resample this blue with an "Alt" or "Option" click. Now when I click, I'm going to put blue down and if I paint across, I'm going to get my stripes. But if I paint here, or here, or here, or here, you can see that I'm going back to the original color. It's not aligned to the original design unless I start painting and don't stop. If I start painting blue here and just behind paint, paint, paint, paint, then I get my three stripes. But I've still got blue as my starting point. There's a very big difference between aligned and not aligned. Sometimes the difference between these two settings has a really big impact on the quality of the clone or whether you were even able to clone something successfully. Just be aware that the aligned option is going to change the way that the clone brush works. In some cases that might be to your advantage.
7. Pt 6 - Pen tool and the Spot Healing Brush: In a previous video, we were looking at removing wires from a fence. But here, we've got some really curved wires in our image. If we want to remove those, then we could use the Pen tool. Now, I know a lot of people don't like the Pen tool, but let's just have a look and see what we could do with it. I'm setting it to Path, that's really important. What I'm going do, is I'm going to drag out a pen line that's basically going to cover this line here. I'm clicking and dragging to start it off. I'm going to click and drag, to just position it over this line here and let's come up here and finish off with clicking and dragging. I'll press Escape to get back out of that. I'm going to make a few more of these lines, just so that we can see how this would work. So I'll click here, just click and drag to start my pen line. I'll click and drag, following this wire with my pen line, press Escape. If you need to re-align your lines, you can go to the Direct Selection Tool and pick up any of these anchor points, and just adjust your line. Align your line as close as you can possibly to the actual line that you want to get rid of. We're just going do one more here. Once I've created the lines that I want to use, I've only done a few, but that'll be sufficient for this example. I'm going to grab the Path Selection Tool. I'm just going to drag over these path, so I have them selected. If we go to the Path palette, you can see that the paths are selected. What I want to do is to use the Spot Healing Brush to heal over these paths. So I'm just going to test the size of my brush. It looks pretty good, although I might want it to be a little bit harder. So it's going to be a little bit more accurate around the edges. So I'll do that. What I'm going do is click this fly-out menu and choose '"Stroke Path", because this gives me options for stroking my path. One of the options here is to use the Spot Healing Brush to stroke it with. I'll select that and click "OK". That works exactly the same way, as if I had actually painted that Spot Healing Brush over those lines. Just going to select away from those lines, and let's just deselect the paths themselves. It's done a pretty poor job here, but for the rest of the lines they've been removed with the Spot Healing Brush used with paths. Sometimes when you've got lots of curved lines and if you're a dab-hand with the Pen tool, then you might consider drawing paths and then applying the Spot Healing Brush to those paths to get rid of those lines.
8. Pt 7 - Removing Tourists: It's possible in Photoshop to get rid of tourists from photos provided you have photos and have enough clean content. I have a couple of images of this particular tavern in London. In this image, there are three people in this position, in this image, there is a bike in that position and a person over here. There are a couple of people here. What I want to do is I want to end up with this person and this bike and nothing else. It's possible to do that in Photoshop. What I'm going to do is take one of these images and from the layers palette, I'll right-click on the layer and choose "Duplicate Layer". What I want to do is to send a duplicate of this layer into the other image. I'm just going to select the second image and click "Okay". Now, I can just get rid of this one because I need it no longer. In this second image, I now have two layers, and these are the two individual images. You can see that I've moved from one image to the next. I'm going to unlock the background layer here, which you can do either by clicking on the lock icon in the most recent versions of Photoshop or you can double-click the layer and click "Okay". I need to select both these layers because I need to align everything. I'm going to choose "Edit" and then I'm going to choose "Auto-Align Layers". I just want to select "Auto" as my projection and I'll click "Okay". What Photoshop does is it aligns the key elements in each of these photos. Now, when I click these on and off, you can see that the people are moving but the buildings are not any longer because they've been lined up perfectly. Now, what I need to do is just poke a hole in this layer to see the image below. I'm going to do this one with a mask. I'm going click on this layer and click here on "Add Layer Mask". Now, with layer masks, you can paint with black to poke a hole through the image. I've switched to black paint here. I've got a paint brush here and a nice soft brush. You can see its hardness is very low. In fact, I'm going to wind it up to about 60 percent hardness. I've got this mask here selected, that's really important when you're painting, otherwise you're going to paint on the image with black, you don't want to paint on the mask with black. I'm enlarging and shrinking the brush here using the open and close square bracket case. What I'm going to do is just paint over here, just to remove the people. When I do that, the bicycle in the layer below is revealed. If you're ever out photographing at a tourist location or you want to get an image without tourists, then the easiest thing to do is to stand in the same place for a few minutes and photograph a few shots of the location. You can do a number of shots, but you can also just do two like I did here. I've kept this person over here, but I've got rid of the people here that I didn't want. To finish this of, I want to crop the image because in aligning the layers, I've lost some of the image. So I'm just going to crop in from the sides a little bit. Not just to clean up the edges of the image, but I also probably want to compose it just a little bit better. There you have it, a nice easy way for removing tourists from photos provided, of course, that you realize that you've got a problem when you're out shooting and you take enough images to give you the clean content that you want for removing the bits that you don't want.
9. Pt 8 - Project and wrap up: Your project for this class will be to find an image that has something in it that you want to get rid of and then go ahead and get rid of it. I'll give you a link to download that horse image and also to download the cottage image in case you want to use either of those to practice on. Post an image of your completed cleaned-up picture as your class project. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned things about Photoshop that you didn't know before. As you're watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which asks you if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class and learned something from it, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes to the fact that you would recommend this class to others. Secondly, write just a few words about why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name is Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
