In this video you will learn how to remove distracting content from your photos in Lightroom CC.
You can follow along with any photo or you can download the sample file from the Adobe page for this tutorial.
Once you import the sample photo into Lightroom CC.
You will see it in the photo grid.
Double click on it to open it.
In this photo you can see a few distracting pieces of trash on the sidewalk.
In Lightroom CC you can easily remove spots and distracting small objects with the Healing Brush.
Start by clicking on the Band-Aid icon to reveal the Healing Brush controls.
Then click on the 1:1 button to zoom in and hold the Spacebar and click and drag to pan the image to get a better view of the sidewalk.
Then use the Healing Brush to remove this small piece of paper.
First adjust your brush settings, leave the Mode set to Heal for now.
You can use the Size slider to adjust your brush size.
Feather controls the sharpness of the brush edge.
Lower values give you a sharper edge, while higher values give you a softer edge.
In this example the default setting of 50 will work.
Opacity controls the transparency of the adjustment.
Leave it at 100 to make the adjustment completely opaque.
The Visualize Spots feature applies an overlay to an image that makes it easy to see small distractions such as blemishes in the skin or spots created by dust in your camera sensor.
Hover over the piece of paper and resize the brush, so that it's slightly larger than the piece of paper.
You can press the right bracket key on the keyboard to make the brush larger or press the left bracket key to make it smaller.
Then click and the paper will disappear.
If you don't see these white circles, then make sure that your cursor is over the image and press the O key on the keyboard to enable the tool overlay.
The white circle on the bottom is the sample source, the area that Lightroom CC automatically selected to generate new pixels.
And it placed those pixels over that area that you painted on, illustrated by the arrow between the two points.
Press O to disable the overlay and use the same technique to remove these pieces of paper.
Then hold the Spacebar and click indirect to center it on screen and try to remove this larger object Resize your brush with the bracket keys, then click and drag over it.
This time Lightroom CC didn't automatically select the best sample source.
Press O to enable the overlay.
Notice how the sample source does not match the texture on the street.
To get good results you need to sample from an area with similar content.
If the sampled area is different, then simply click and drag the sample source to a similar area.
For example, you could place the sample source under the piece of trash.
As soon as you release the object will disappear.
To get a better view of the results, Press the O key to hide the overlay, then pan to the far left of the photo.
We will now remove this distracting yellow rope.
If you simply paint over it to remove it, you may create smudging near the edge of the frame.
Currently we are in the Heal Mode, which blends the sampled pixels with the pixels that you painted over.
But sometimes this blend may create smudging in dark areas that are against the light background or vice versa.
Let's try again.
Enable the overlay, then right click on the pin, and select Delete, then change the Mode to Clone, which simply copies pixels from one area to another, hover over the yellow rope and resize your brush if you need to.
Then click once on the edge of the post, hold the Shift key and click on this area.
Lightroom CC will then draw a straight line between the two points.
Press O to disable the overlay and notice how the Clone Mode does a much better job in this area.
You can then try the same technique to remove the rest of the rope.
Click here, hold Shift, and click on the opposite end.
Unfortunately, in this case cloning didn't match the lighting on the wall, it gave us a visible line.
But we can easily fix it, by changing the Mode from Clone to Heal.
Lightroom CC will then reassemble the pixels using the Heal Mode and it will blend the pixels to match the lighting.
And the photo looks much better.
Click on the Fit button and press the Show Original button to see the original image.
Click again to see the edited version.
There's no need to save in Lightroom CC all your adjustments sync automatically to all your devices and you can edit them at any time.
If you want to remove a larger more complex object, then click on the three-dot menu and select Edit in Photoshop.
Then use Photoshop CC's powerful compositing tools to remove the object.
Now that you know how to remove small distracting objects from your photos in Lightroom CC go ahead and try these techniques out on your photos.
