We’ve all heard it before. From family and friends. From clients. ”Can you photoshop ______ out?”. And while I’m a firm believer of doing as little work as possible in Photoshop, there are instances where the patch tool can be very helpful.
For instance, a few months ago we were at the beach and i was trying to take this wide shot of Kennedy and Chuck playing in the sand. And this couple comes strolling through the back of my shot and decided to have a little chat and hang out. Apparently they wanted to be on my blog.
This is where the patch tool and “content aware” in Photoshop CS6 come in handy. It’s a very easy fix.
1) Select the patch tool 
Make sure “patch” in the top toolbar ” is set to “content aware”. Draw around the area you want to remove.
2) Drag that selection over to an area that has similar background. In this image I moved it over to the left.
3) Poof! He’s gone! I repeated the step with the other person and dragged it over to the right this time.
4) When I zoom in it looks pretty good
If there’s anything you need to fix at this point you can use the spot healing brush tool for touch ups
5) There are some dirty spots on my sensor. Yuck!
So I simply use that spot healing brush tool to get rid of those. (If you need to know how to clean you sensor see this post. Super easy!).
6) And that’s it. Super easy and the annoying people are gone!
