Picture a beautiful shot of a beach at sunset or a snowy mountain...but there's a backhoe spoiling the glory. Or maybe you snapped a photo of your loved one in a special place, only to find unloved ones marring the shot. Don't worry; you can remove unwanted objects and people from your photos thanks to some powerful tools in Adobe Photoshop.
For years, you've been able to remove a subject from a background image with Photoshop, but it’s now easier than ever with new AI features and tools, specifically the Remove Tool. It removes a person or thing from a photo and generates a plausible background to fill in where the object used to be.
While older tools, like Photoshop's Content-Aware Fill and Healing Brush, can remove objects from images and have been doing so for a few years, they don't work as automatically or neatly as the AI-powered Remove Tool added in the June 2023 update. The Remove Tool is both more straightforward to use and more accurate than the previous methods.
The example above is pretty complex, and I chose it to give the Remove Tool a challenge and to show you potential pitfalls. But you should know that the Remove Tool works extremely well on some shots, in particular those with a uniform blurry background and a clear human subject, shown below.
Get More Out of Photoshop
To learn the ins and outs of the top image editing software, as well as hear about its newest features, read our full Adobe Photoshop review. You can also stay on top of related news and reviews on PCMag's Adobe coverage page.