Windows Photos has gained tools you may not be aware of if you have not used the app recently. It is worth a fresh look. Here’s how to use the object removal tool to erase items from photos.
Sometimes we think we have taken a great photo, only to discover when we look at it later that it contains something we wish was not there. For example, people in a landscape photo, posts, and signs that stick up out of people’s heads, or someone we no longer want to see in a group photo.
There are many reasons for wanting to remove objects or people from photos, and there are many tools that are up to the task. AI tools are everywhere these days, and even the Windows Photos app has gained a couple of great ones. In this article, I will look at one of them, the object removal tool.
If you are not a regular user of the Windows Photos app, you might not have realized that it had new AI features, so it is time you loaded the app and checked out what you can do with it. I will be using the latest version of Windows Photos in Windows 11, so make sure they are both up to date. Older versions don’t have the features I will use.
Related: See all photography tips on RAWinfopages
Load a photo into Windows Photos
Click the Start button and type ‘photos’, then click Open to open the Windows Photos app. You can then open a photo that contains objects or people you want to remove. You may be able to double-click a JPEG image in Explorer to open it in the Photos app, but other apps can take over the file association.
Here is a photograph of a beach. It contains people, and there is also a green dot. I don’t know where that came from, but like the unwanted people, it can easily be removed. Removing people and flaws in the photo will improve it. Click the first icon in the toolbar to edit the currently displayed image.
In the editor, click the second to last icon, which looks a bit like a flower to me but may, possibly, be two crossed first aid sticking plasters. It is hard to tell.
Erase items from photos in Windows Photos
The spot fix object eraser tool is basic but very easy to use. The cursor becomes a circle when the mouse is over the image. Its size can be set on a slider on the right. Make it wide enough to cover the object horizontally, and then click over the thing you want to erase in the photo.
It may require more than one click to completely remove an object or person from the image, and in my case, it took three clicks to remove the top, middle, and bottom of the person. After removing one unwanted item from the photo, you can click on other items to remove them.
When you have finished removing unwanted items from the photo, click the Save options button and select Save as copy. You should always keep the original photo and never overwrite it; then you can use it for other purposes.
Remove people from photos
Here is another example, and in this photograph, I want to remove a person. The size of the circular cursor is set to be just a bit wider than the person using the slider on the right. A couple of clicks on the person removes them from the photo.
As you can see from the screenshots, the results are quite good, and you would not know that people had been removed from the photos. However, it does not work so well in all photos.
Final thoughts
There does not seem to be much AI at work in this object removal tool. It looks to me like it pulls in pixels to the right and left of the object, stretching them to fill the area occupied by the object to be removed.
Sometimes this works well, as in my examples, but sometimes you can see how it has stretched and smudged the area, and it is not nice. The results vary greatly, and it depends on the object’s size and the nature of the photo. It is sometimes great, sometimes not so great.
This is not the best object removal tool I have tried, but it is easy to use and free with Windows, so maybe I shouldn’t complain too much. No doubt it will be improved in app updates.
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