Lesson Info
6. Content-Aware Remove Tool
Lessons
Lesson Info
Content-Aware Remove Tool
We've got a new retouching tool in Lightroom Classic that is known as the Content Aware Remove tool. And so let's take a look at what it allows us to do. Here I am in Lightroom Classics develop module. I've clicked on the retouch tool and in here we have a new tool right there. It looks almost like a little pencil eraser but if you hover over it and pause, you should get a tool tip to let you know it is the Content Aware Remove tool. Let's compare how it works to the two tools that have been in here for quite some time. What makes this tool different than the others is that the other two tools will blatantly copy from one area and put it somewhere else. If you use the clone version, I could paint over something like this and it's just gonna pick an area from the surroundings to use and it's gonna copy it and put it over there but it's not gonna do anything to make sure that this area is the proper brightness and that the edge blends in. So when I move away, I can see the edge of that. ...
I can see, especially in the left edge where it's a little too dark for its surroundings. So you could always switch between these tools after painting. And the middle tool acts the same as the one on the right except for it takes the extra step of ensuring that the brightness and color is going to match all the way around the edge. So when I click on Heal, you'll see an update and now it ends up looking much better. The only thing is right here where it hits the edge of the screen, it still has a little hint of the original information there and sometimes you can just come over here and go over it a second time. In this case, it copied from a terrible area. So let's tell it to copy from there. There we cleaned that up. So anyway, the tool on the far right does not do anything to get things to blend in. The tool in the middle does make things match their surroundings, but it's going to blatantly copy from another area of the picture. So if for instance, I come in here and let's say a zoom up on the top of this tower and what I'd really like to do is remove the telephone line that is sitting right there. Well, what I could do is get a brush that is not too big and I can just paint across this little telephone line or power line or whatever it is. And when I let go, it's gonna attempt to remove it but it's gonna do that by copying from somewhere else. And in this case it copied from just below. And there's really nowhere in here where I could just drag this around to say where can we copy from that would be appropriate for that area because there's nothing else in the image that's shaped like this area is supposed to be. So instead of using either of the original tools that we've had in Lightroom, I'm gonna switch to the new tool. Well, that new tool is different in that it constructs brand new material based on things that looks like the surroundings. And it's gonna give you a better result whenever you have an area that needs something very specific to match the shapes of its surroundings. Now here I did mess up a little bit. All I need to do is if you type the letter "H", H will hide the little retouching overlay that's there and therefore you'll be able to paint on top of it again to say, I want to do retouching on top of retouching. If you didn't type the letter H when you clicked here, you'd be moving this. So I'm gonna type H and if I didn't like what happened in this area, I'm just gonna paint over that area again and it's gonna take a fresh look. Anytime you use one of these tools, you can force it to create a new choice by going to your keyboard and just next to the Shift key is the forward slash key. If you press forward slash you're gonna force it to take another attempt at that same area and deliver slightly different material. And I could do that until it ends up giving me something that might look appropriate. Then maybe I come up here and see if I need to retouch that area. And if it doesn't give what I like it again, I would hit that slash but I think that's close to usable. So let's see how this works with other areas. Here we have some text. I doubt any tool is gonna do great there without a human intervention, but let's find out. You never know. I'm just gonna take this tool and go right across this area and instead of just blatantly copying from the surroundings, it's going to try to construct some info and you see the letter "O" on the right, not too bad. And so I just might need to come over here and try this area again and maybe this area, maybe just a few more or just hit that slash key to say, "Hey, pick a different area." Pick a different area. The other thing you can do with this tool is let me undo these a few. I'm gonna just hit the Delete key to get rid of some. If I type H I can see where I've put them in. Oops, not that one. I wanted to get rid of those small one 'cause I liked when it got rid of that. Okay, and I think I got the small one this time. Nope. Anyway, I'll leave that one. What I wanna do is I wanna show you how you get more influence over this tool. So I'll take a letter H to hide the edges and let's say that right here is what I wanna retouch, I let go and it doesn't deliver a great result. Well I can tell it to think about another part of the picture and to use content that looks like it. So what I'm gonna do is down here we have another letter "O". I'm gonna hold on the Command key, that is Control in Windows. And I'm going to just do this. And then it's only gonna think about the area that's inside that shape when it figures out what to use. And it did up there, I can see that it did move it in. I'm just gonna hit the slash key a few times to see if it can come up with anything better and it doesn't look like it. So I might instead tell it to think about this part. Nope. So I might instead tell it to think about this. Oh, that is down below. This tool usually I give it three strikes and that it's out. And in this case I've tried three different areas at least. And so what I'm gonna do is switch over to the middle tool that is here because with that middle tool, if I type the letter "H" so I can actually see what it's copying from, I can drag down here and tell it to copy from this other area and see if I can manually tell it exactly what would look best, something more like that. But you might be surprised how many different areas that this could give you a semi usable result that you only have to touch up a little bit with other tools. So let's see here where we can find something complicated. Well, here is a shadow that I would like to remove. And so I'm gonna come over here and just paint across the shadow, making sure the entire tee of the shadow is included within this shape that I'm drawing and hopefully it's going to be able to analyze the surroundings and figure out what to use. Now in this case though, I had already switched to the middle tool, so that's where just blatantly copy some somewhere that's not gonna do a good job. Let's switch over to our our Content Aware Remove tool. And already I can see that it's dramatically better and there's just a few areas I need to touch up. So what I might do is type the letter "H" and it could have been that right there, I simply didn't paint far enough in that I excluded a portion of what needed to be retouched out of where I painted. And it might have been the same over here or it just needed a second application, but now that's looking pretty darn good across the entirety of the area. So a few things to keep in mind and that is if you use the tool and it seems to generate the wrong kind of information, hold down the Command key, Control on Windows, make a rectangle around a portion of the image that does contain what it should be copying from and it will construct material from an area like that. If you still don't like what you're getting, press the forward slash key on your keyboard, it will force it to make another attempt. And then you can switch between the various tools and try not to use that new tool on anything that is overly simple. What I mean by that is if I were to use it to get rid of let's say the stoplight that was here, I doubt it's gonna do a good job when what it needs to replace here should be replaced with something overly simple. Oftentimes it will fail. So I'm gonna use this and what's gonna happen most of the time is it's gonna deliver a result that is too complicated, that is just not gonna be mega smooth. So I'll do that and we'll see if it messes up. I'm gonna type "H" to hide and there is a little black thing it put in there. I'm not sure why it put in some black but oftentimes it's just not gonna look smooth. In this case, just a simple click afterwards to retouch that area again is probably gonna fix it but I wouldn't usually use it in a smooth area of the sky. I would instead prefer to use the Healing option.
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CLASS MATERIALS
Ratings and Reviews
a Creativelive Student
Excellent coverage of all the updates in Lightroom. Ben Wilmore is an amazing instructor.
Petra
What a great class, thank you Ben!!
Eric Baim
Concise, clear, and invaluable. Great information not just on the new features but when and how to use them, and their strengths and weaknesses.
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