How To Remove Power Lines From Your Photos In Lightroom

In this video, by photographer Anthony Morganti we look at ways of removing power lines from photos in Lightroom.

Remove power lines with Lightroom

The following method is designed to work best with relatively simple cases where the power lines are fairly easily removable and appear over a simple background. If you have a more complex background (trees for example), Photoshop is probably your better option (see some links to videos on how to do this below).

Morganti suggests that the spot removal tool is the tool that you should consider for this task in Lightroom and that the heal brush is typically better than the clone brush.

As for the exact settings – Morganti suggests feather at around 20 and opacity at 100. Now for the more important tip – while you might be tempted to try and remove a long line in one go – this is usually not the best idea (although you can always try and see how the results will look).

Morganti prefers to try and clean the line in small chunks (choosing segments that have a similar background as much as possible).

The heal brush allows you to choose where to sample the healing brush and you can choose a different source if the one Lightroom chose is not good enough. If you want to hide this option to see the image better just click “h” on the keyboard (and “h” again to make this show again).

The more complex task starts when you hit an area where the healing brush does do a good job and even moving it around doesn’t help – you can change the feathering and see if that helps but if not, try and correct even smaller parts each time.

More power lines tutorials (via Photoshop)

The topic of removing power lines and other similar lines) from images is very popular as you can expect and we have covered it in-depth on several other videos, mostly using Photoshop.

Bryan O’Neil Hughes showed several techniques for removing objects from images using Adobe Photoshop and Jesús Ramirez also demonstrated ways for removing power lines in the software and finally Colin Smith shared some fast ways of performing the same task.

You can check out more useful Lightroom guides and tips on our LensVid Lightroom section as well as more videos by Anthony Morganti here on Lensvid.

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.