Photoshop How To

There’s often something in the foreground or background of an image you just want to get rid of. Whether it’s distracting object like a fireplug or a telephone pole, or another person that’s drawing attention away from your subject, wouldn’t your photo look so much better if you could make these things vanish?

We get it. Not every photo you shoot is going to have eye-popping color or attractive dynamic range. But like a lot of things with imaging, you can fix some of your visual mistakes in Photoshop.

It’s not uncommon to end up with underexposed photos if you don’t carefully compensate for bright light sources in the background of a scene. But mistakes are meant to fixed, not trashed, as you’ll see in the Lightroom tutorial below.

Here’s a typical photo scenario: someone you know has an otherwise attractive portrait which, unfortunately, also includes an ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend in the shot. They want to keep the portrait of them but get rid of the now unwanted dude or gal in the shot. Knowing that you know a little something about Photoshop they come to you to, ahem, retouch the image.

It’s not uncommon to have a distracting object or two in otherwise beautiful outdoor images. Sometimes that’s because you weren’t paying attention, while in other cases there was simply no way to compose the scene without the offending objects in the frame.

We've taught you how to remove background distractions in Photoshop before but what do you do when there's a complicated object that looks almost impossible to eliminate without ruining your photo? Well, you turn to Photoshop master Unmesh Dinda of PiXimperfect for help, which is what we did with the below tutorial.

Continuing our series on some basic object removal techniques in Photoshop, Colin Smith of photoshopCAFE weighs in again in the below video titled "How to Remove People from a Photo in Photoshop in a Few Clicks."