How do I remove something or someone from a photo?

Small removals against plain backgrounds are trivial. Large ones against detailed backgrounds are a reconstruction job, and knowing the difference before you start saves an hour.

Difficulty: intermediate
Time: 16 min
Read: 4 min

Short answer

Use the healing or object-removal tool, work in small pieces rather than selecting the whole object at once, and always select slightly more than the object including its shadow. Plain backgrounds — sky, wall, grass, water — fill convincingly. Anything crossing a straight line, a face, a repeating pattern or a horizon needs manual patching from elsewhere in the image, or a different approach such as cropping.

Every phone and every editor now has an object removal tool, and they are genuinely good. What they are good at is filling with plausible texture; what they are poor at is continuing structure. That distinction predicts almost every result you will get.

Step by step

Ask whether cropping does it.If the object is near an edge, cropping is faster, keeps every pixel genuine and often improves the composition. Removal is for things in the middle of the frame.
Include the shadow and the reflection.The commonest failure is removing a person and leaving their shadow on the ground or their reflection in a window. Select both, or the picture reads as wrong without the viewer knowing why.
Work in small overlapping pieces.Removing a large object in one selection asks the software to invent a large area coherently, which is where it fails. Several small removals, each with plenty of nearby texture to sample, works far better.
Select slightly larger than the object.Leaving a rim of the original edge behind produces a visible dark or light outline. A little generosity in the selection avoids it.
Use clone or patch tools for structure.Anything crossing a straight line — a railing, a roof edge, a horizon, a paving joint — needs a source with the same structure. Clone from another part of the same line rather than letting the software guess, and align carefully.
Match grain and noise.Filled areas are often smoother than the rest of the photograph, which shows as a suspiciously clean patch. Adding a small amount of matching grain over the repair blends it in.
Check at full size and then from a distance.Look at 100% for edges and repeats, then fit the whole image on screen and look for a patch that draws the eye. Both checks catch different failures.
Watch for repeated texture.Generative fills sometimes duplicate a distinctive feature — the same cloud twice, the same flower, the same brick pattern. It is invisible while you work and obvious to anyone else.
Know when to stop.If a removal has taken twenty minutes and still shows, the photograph probably does not support it. Crop, convert to black and white, or use a different frame.
Be honest about what the picture is for.Removing a bin from a holiday photograph is retouching. Removing damage from a photograph in a sales listing, an insurance claim or a property advertisement is misrepresentation. The tool does not know the difference and you do.

Tips

Photograph the same scene twice a few seconds apart when people are moving through it. Patching from the second frame is far cleaner than any generated fill.
Removing something is usually easier than it looks against sky, water, grass, sand and plain walls, and much harder than it looks against brickwork, foliage with structure, and anything with a repeating pattern.
Zoom in and work at a comfortable brush size — too large a brush is the main cause of smeared edges.

Common mistakes

Removing the object and leaving its shadow — The eye reads shadows without conscious attention, so the picture looks wrong even when the viewer cannot say why. Always remove both together.
Selecting the whole of a large object in one go — The fill has to invent a large coherent area with little to sample from, so it produces smears, repeats or invented structure. Break it into overlapping pieces.

If it doesn't work

Visible smeared patch

Cause: Too large an area filled at once, or no matching texture nearby — Fix: Undo and work in small pieces, or clone from a genuinely similar area of the same photograph.

Straight line does not line up after the fill

Cause: Generative fill cannot reliably continue structure — Fix: Clone along the line manually from another section of it, using a rectangular selection to keep the alignment.

Repaired area is smoother than the rest

Cause: Fill produces cleaner pixels than the original — Fix: Add a small amount of grain matched to the photograph over the repaired area.

Halo or dark rim around the removal

Cause: Selection too tight — Fix: Redo it with a slightly larger selection that includes the object's edge pixels.

Questions people ask

Are the phone removal tools good enough?

For small objects on plain backgrounds, yes — they are very good and take seconds. They struggle with the same things desktop tools struggle with, and they give you less control when they get it wrong.

Does removing something reduce image quality?

The removed area is synthetic rather than photographic, so it will not hold up to enlargement the way the rest of the image does, and it will not contain real detail. For normal viewing sizes this is invisible.