How to Remove Distracting Stuff in Photoshop
Don’t let distractions ruin good photographs! Join Scott Kelby for a class devoted to teaching you how to remove all of those distracting elements from your photographs. Whether it is unwanted bright spots in the background, power lines stretching across a sky, walls covered in graffiti, stray hairs on a portrait, or too many tourists in your landscape (to name a few), Scott has a technique to save the day. This class is designed to start you off with an introduction to the essential tools you’ll need inside of Photoshop, and then each lesson that follows is a project unto itself that demonstrates a wide range of techniques you can add to your skill set. You can even download the project files and follow along. Even if you’re familiar with some of the tools, Scott has included all kinds of little tricks he’s picked up over the years to help you get the job done faster than ever before.
Release Date: 2016-10-26
Lessons
Introduction
Join Scott as he introduces the class and discusses what will be covered in the lessons that follow.
Duration: 3 mins 52 seconds
Essential Tools
Get introduced to the essential tools used throughout this class.
Duration: 21 mins 3 seconds
Spot Removal
There are a few different ways to go about removing spots from your photos.
Duration: 5 mins 45 seconds
Power Lines
Dealing with power lines and street lights requires a combination of tools to get the job done.
Duration: 12 mins 22 seconds
Stretching a Background
There are a few situations where a simple trick can get the job done.
Duration: 3 mins 45 seconds
Removing Tourists
With a little camera work up front there are a couple of ways to remove unwanted people from your vacation photos.
Duration: 11 mins 26 seconds
Blending Layers to Remove Distractions
Shooting with this technique in mind gives you the flexibility to easily remove your assistant from the photo.
Duration: 3 mins 16 seconds
Fixing a Pattern
Here’s a technique to file away in case you ever encounter a patterned background with wrinkles.
Duration: 2 mins 17 seconds
Removing Signs
Signs can be distracting to the eye, but can usually be pretty easily removed.
Duration: 7 mins 25 seconds
Taking Out the Trash
Trash cans can be found all over the place, but can really be a distraction to your shot.
Duration: 8 mins 27 seconds
Removing Telephone Poles
Removing telephone poles can be tedious, but it is not hard.
Duration: 3 mins 17 seconds
Cleaning Graffiti
Graffiti can really kill a shot and can be worth the time to clear out of your scene.
Duration: 5 mins 44 seconds
Removing Lens Flare
Lens flare can be one of the hardest things to retouch and remove. Here are a few techniques that can help.
Duration: 11 mins 36 seconds
Scaffolding Removal
All the most historic places require constant maintenance and repair, which means there will be scaffolding in place during some visit.
Duration: 11 mins 29 seconds
Reducing Halos
An unwanted artifact from certain post-processing techniques are areas of lightness or halos around edges in your photograph.
Duration: 4 mins 33 seconds
Removing Reflections in Glasses
This is a really challenging problem, but there are some things you can do.
Duration: 2 mins 55 seconds
Dealing with Banding
Banding can appear where there is a color gradient, such as a sky, and looks like a stair step appearance.
Duration: 1 mins 51 seconds
Removing Tattoos
Tattoo removal can be easy or more challenging. Here are a few techniques for a variety of situations.
Duration: 4 mins 45 seconds
Dealing with Light Spill
Light can spill into backgrounds, buildings, and other subjects and cause a distraction.
Duration: 2 mins 3 seconds
Opening Eyes
Sometimes you may find that a subject may have one eye that is more closed than the other, but there is an easy fix.
Duration: 2 mins 40 seconds
Clearing Cables
Cables and power cords are a fact of digital life, but you don’t have to keep them in your photographs if they are a distraction.
Duration: 4 mins 4 seconds
That’s a Moire
A moire pattern can appear in fabrics, grid textures, and buildings. It doesn’t happen often, but there is a tool designed to fix it.
Duration: 2 mins 4 seconds
Reducing Bright Spots
The eye is drawn to areas of brightness in your photos, so you want to be able to reduce any distracting bright spots to direct the viewer to what is important.
Duration: 8 mins 18 seconds
Stray Hair Removal
Flyaway hairs are a common retouch in portrait photography.
Duration: 2 mins 51 seconds
Floral Fixes
We love to photograph flowers, but they often come with distractions in many forms.
Duration: 12 mins 34 seconds
Removing Edge Distractions
A very common problem is having distractions poking in from one of the edges of your photograph.
Duration: 8 mins 30 seconds
Final Project
Scott wraps up the class with a project that utilizes multiple tools to pull it all together.
Duration: 2 mins 56 seconds