We live on a very populated planet.  Sometimes we have the perfect shot in my, but the shirtless middle aged smoker at the beach isn’t budging from our picturesque scene.  What do you do?   Remove him with photoshop thats what you do.  Photoshop is an extremely powerful tool, and an it really shines in, is in the ability to remove items from you images.

To do this you really need only a couple tools, the lasso tool, content aware fill tool, the clone stamp tool and the spot healing tool.  If you don’t know how to use these tools Adobe TV has some great tutorials.  For the photo below I just circled the items I wanted to get rid of with the lasso tool, then right clicked on the selection and selected fill-content aware.  This process moves the item pretty close to perfectly.  There will be areas that need to be cleaned up though.  The best way to do this I have found is with the clone stamp tool.  Select the area you want to sample from with the option key and then click on the site where you want to cover something.  There are two key things you need to remember when using the stamp tool and they are the opacity setting and the brush selection.  I usually use a soft edged brush and about 60-80% opacity.

The changes below were done in about 5 minutes and a color effect was added to pop the clarity and vibrance a little.  They key to removing thins in photo usually means making changes gradually.  The content aware fill tool has improved with every addition of the software since its introduction.

Don’t miss shots because they aren’t perfect.  Things can be fixed rather simply in Post Production.  Hope you enjoyed this.

Citation: Photoshop logo used here is property of Adobe and used for educational purposes only, Citation: (n.d.) Adobe. Retrieved February 28, 2017, from http://www.adobe.com/photoshop

All photo imagery is original work, produced by Christopher F. Bergeron