I have two photos that have areas I find quite distracting and I want to remove them or hide them in the images. I thought I would start with Lightroom Classic and then expand into other Software tools. There are some fabulous new tools in Adobe Lightroom Classic and some that were improved dramatically in the latest updates which happened since October 2022.
So for my two images, I am going to look at healing or removing the distracting elements with the newly updated Healing tools and then jump into some masking.
Using the Healing tools
There has been a Healing tool in Lightroom Classic for a long time now, but sadly I found it glitchy and slow and I much preferred to export/edit my images in Photoshop for anything more complicated than a dust spot. But, I must admit, the newly updated healing tools are much better. The Content-aware Remove tool in particular is actually quite good. Sometimes, it gets a bit glitchy if your object takes up too much of your image or it is on an edge, but overall quite good.
Using masking tools
The new Masking tools in Lightroom Classic are fabulous, a terrific edition and most people seem to agree. But some people are still struggling to get it all to work just the way they want. But a few steps can make masking a whole lot easier.
I haven’t edited these images any further, but it is a simple step to start your editing process from here. As Lightroom is completely nondestructive you can edit the masks again and again or even edit your portrait further from this starting point.
