October 30, 2024

I can’t believe what Adobe has done now

You are going to be amazed by the new Remove tool in Adobe Photoshop's latest release. It's well worth £10 a month!


When Adobe announced the subscription model for its products in 2013, many people thought it was just an easy way for Adobe to make regular money from its customers. What we have seen is significant development across its product lines, and in the case of the Photography Plan, there has been no price increase over the entire period.

We get a significant upgrade to the programs every six months or so. Sometimes, the release isn’t that exciting, as with the October 2024 update for Lightroom. However, when it comes to Photoshop, there is something quite impressive that will reduce the amount of time it takes to edit some of our photographs.

The big thing that I will demonstrate in this episode is a new Remove tool. Rather than talk about it, let’s get straight into showing you what it does.

Okay, so here’s the image that I’m going to demonstrate the Remove tool with. It’s taken last night on one of my night photography workshops here in Edinburgh. We had a quite a nice sunset. The problem we’ve got, clearly, is all these people down here in the bottom of the screen, and we’ve also got this blue wire that’s there, I think, to protect that grass that’s growing.

So the new remove tool, where it’s located over here, we’ve got the Spot Healing Brush tool. And if we click on the little side arrow in there, right, click on it, and we’re going to come to the Remove tool. You can also use the key press J to toggle between it.

So if we click on the Remove tool now, up here at the top of the screen, we’ve got this new box called Find distractions. The first thing we’re going to do is get rid of the people. So click on the Find distractions button and then click on people.

Now this does take a few seconds. You can imagine the AI that’s going on here, but it selects the people pretty well, and you can see every one of the people we wanted has been selected.

There’s one there that probably I don’t want to be selected. So I can press the Option or Alt key and just go over that and remove that particular point, because that’s clearly not a person. So those are all the people I want to be selected. It’s got a little bit there where it’s missed that lady’s feet. So again, I’m just going to add that in, click on the tick up here, and now Photoshop is going to go away, and it’s going to look at all these elements, and it’s going to replace it with what it thinks should go behind each of these people.

So let’s give it a few seconds see how it works. Still thinking, unfortunately, Obviously, the faster your laptop is, the faster this process is going to work. But you can imagine there is quite a lot a lot of processing going on here to move all these people. And I think I’m probably looking at 15 or 20 people inside of the image.

And there we go. There’s all the people have been removed as if by magic. So what was that? Probably 40 seconds to enable all those people to removed? And it’s done a really good job. As you can see down here, all the railings are still there, but we’ve still got this blue wire that’s going around the edge. So we’re going to click back up to the find distractions box again, click on wires and cables. And this time, it’s going to go and look for wires and cables. And because it’s looking at something which is fairly clear. It’s going to go away and it’s going to do this without me having to think about and tell it where the wires are.

Few seconds later, and there we go. Most of those wires have been taken so I’m just going to zoom into and can see how good a job it’s done of getting rid of most of those wires. It’s done a pretty good job, but you can see we’ve still got the poles where the wires have been stuck onto. So I’m just going to use the square brackets to make my cursor a little bit smaller, and then just go over the top of each of the poles.

Just manually mark them in, still using this remove tool. I don’t need to be particularly accurate, because it does a pretty good job of working out what I want to remove and getting rid of it. I think that’s the last, there’s another one more here, and there we go. We’ve got rid of all of the slight distractions in the image. I’m just going to go there, because there’s that little bit which seems to have appeared in again. Just hover over that and take it out. And if you now look at the shot, all the people, all the wires, all removed, and really just in a couple of minutes.

I’m sure you’ll agree that this is an impressive addition to the editing tools within Adobe Photoshop. Of course, when I’m shooting editorial press photography, I’m not going to use this kind of technology, but for those who are producing images for advertising, art, or even wedding photographers, this is going to knock hours off the usual cloning and spot removal we would have done previously. If there’s one request I want to make to Adobe, it’s to add the same people and wires remove tool so it works directly in Lightroom.

I certainly think this justifies the monthly fee of just under £10 for the full versions of Lightroom and Photoshop. If you don’t subscribe to the Creative Cloud, click this link to sign up. However, you might also want to wait a few weeks. Usually, in the Amazon Black Friday event, there’s a deal to buy a 12-month subscription to the Photography Plan for a significantly reduced price. I usually e-mail my newsletter subscribers on the morning of the Black Friday sale to point you toward the best deals. Sign up for my newsletter by clicking on the QR Code.