How To Remove People And Objects From The Background In Photoshop

On this basic but important video tutorial Aaron Nace from Phlearn look at several different tools for removing people (and objects) from images in Photoshop.

There are many ways to remove unwanted objects from images and on this video Nace look at some of the tools that can help you achieve this task and the differences between them (it is better to be familiar with more than one method as some work better in different situations).

Here are the five tools Nace talks about on this video:

Spot Healing – the easiest tool to use, Nace recommends starting here and moving to other tools if it doesn’t work well for a particular image.
Healing Brush – while the spot healing brush works well most of the time, since it automatically chooses the sample point for you, it sometimes doesn’t copy the correct texture – so you have the healing brush as a more manual way (Hold ALT/OPTN and click on the desired texture area).
Clone Stamp – This tool will create an exact copy of an area with no blending – this can be good when working close to objects which you do not want to remove.
Patch Tool – this tool takes one area and replace with another area with adaptations.
Content-Aware Fill – this tool will work well on simple backgrounds where the subject is isolated.Photoshop will find similar areas to the background in the selection and fill them in, replacing the object in the selection (like all the other tools which uses content aware technology – this works well some of the time but misses sometimes – in many occasions close to different textures/objects/people).

We have looked at many of these tools for removing objects in the past here on LensVid – for example we published Jesús Ramirez’ video on using the spot healing brush for removing those really annoying power lines in your images.

You can find many more Photoshop video tutorials on LensVid’s Photoshop section (and you can find a lot more Phlearn videos on our special Phlearn subsection).

Iddo Genuth

Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.