Remove objects from a photo

What happens when you let go of the brush

The stroke you paint becomes a hole. Octoolo grows it by a few pixels and softens its edge, so no outline of the old object is left, then cuts out the area around it: a margin as wide as the hole itself, and never less than 32 pixels. That piece of the photo and the hole go to an AI model made for filling holes (MI-GAN), which paints what most likely was behind the object, judging by the colors, lines and textures around it.

Only the inside of the hole changes. Everything outside it stays exactly as it was, pixel for pixel, which is why removing a small thing never softens the rest of the photo. The model runs on your graphics card when Windows offers it one, and on the processor otherwise; a typical stroke takes a moment.

If you decline the download, or the AI cannot run, the brush still works: it fills the hole by blending the colors from its edges inward. That is fine for a dust spot on a plain wall and weak on anything with a pattern.

What it removes well, and where it needs help

Removal works best when the thing to remove is small or medium against a background that repeats: grass, sand, sky, water, a brick wall, a carpet. Typical good cases:

• People and cars in the background of a holiday photo
• Wires, poles and signs across a landscape
• Litter, cables and plugs in a product or room photo
• Spots, blemishes and dust from a scanned print
• A date printed in the corner by an old camera

It struggles where the hidden part cannot be guessed from the rest: half of a face, a pattern with straight lines that must meet exactly, or an object that covers a large share of the frame. For those, work in several smaller strokes rather than one large one, starting from the edges. The model looks at the photo at a modest size, so a very large hole comes back softer than the sharp photo around it; small strokes keep the detail.

Three ways to take things out

The Remove & heal tool has three modes in the bar above the photo, and each suits a different job:

A selection keeps the fill inside it. To take a person off a wall without touching the door frame next to them, select the wall part first with the Lasso (L), then paint: the brush only changes what is selected. To lift something out instead of deleting it, use the Select an object tool (W), which picks a whole object with one click.

Keep the original, compare, and finish

Removal changes the pixels of the layer you are working on, and each stroke is one step in the history, so Ctrl Z undoes them one at a time. Working on a copy of the layer (Ctrl J) makes comparing easy: hide the copy with its eye in the Layers panel to see the photo as it was.

A filled area can look slightly different in grain from the rest of the photo. A light touch of noise or a matching blur over that area, done with a selection, hides the join. If the photo also needs a different crop, crop after removing, since the fill uses what is around the hole and a tight crop leaves it less to work with. Finally, export: Octoolo's export leaves out the hidden data cameras store, such as the place where the photo was taken. To cut a subject out of its background instead, see remove background; to hide a face rather than remove it, see blur faces.