5 Ways to Remove Anything from a Photo in GIMP

[Music] hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies media design my name is Michael Davies and in today's tutorial I'll be showing you five ways to remove anything from a photo in I'll be using git version 2.10 point 20 which is the latest version of at the time of this tutorial before I get into that don't forget to check out my website at Davies media design.com as always I have tons of video tutorials on here my book of layers and open source help articles so definitely check that out you can enroll in my 2.10 masterclass from beginner to pro photo editing on udemy you can enroll in anywise Koecher classes by visiting school calm and you can get more with a premium membership to Davies media design I'll include all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video diving in here here's one photo we'll be working with here is another photo we'll be working with so coming back to the original photo I'm going to open this up so I'll go to file open recent and here is the original I'm going to convert this to giimpse native sRGB color space and some of your minds might have been blown just now yes there is a guy playing guitar in this original photo and he's got a long shadow he's casting here so this was the final result here was another iteration of that and here is the original photo we'll be working with so the first technique for today's tutorial is going to require a third-party plugin it's totally free it's easy to download I do have a tutorial on how to download this plug-in it's called the resynthesizer plug-in a lot of you may be familiar with this plug-in already but this plug-in is best used for removing larger objects from your photos such as this one so once you have the plug-in installed all you need to do is come over here to your free select tool or really any select tool for that matter I'll hold ctrl and zoom in and over here in my tool options you guys might have your tool options down here but inside my tool options I'll make sure the mode is set to add to the current selection or you could just do replace the current selection if you prefer and we're working directly on the image layer for this so what I'll do is I'll loosely draw around my subject I do want to try to stay pretty close to the subject here and I'm going to skip the shadow for now and I'll come up here we're going to erase inside this portion and we'll come back around and connect so I'll hit the enter key and that will apply my selection area using the free select tool I'll hold ctrl and zoom in if you do have this set to the mode of add to the current selection that's going to be best for this next part so if you want you can get closer to the subject here with the Select tool I'm going to hold the ctrl key that's going to enter into the subtract from current selection mode so now we can just subtract any areas we think maybe go too far out this isn't entirely necessary hold the ctrl key we're just subtracting okay and I'll hit the enter key and I'll do one more here I'm not going to get too crazy with this whole control zoom out so once you have sufficiently selected your subject next we're going to actually use the recent the sizer plugin here so to do that I'll go to filters enhance and if you've installed the recent the sizer plug-in properly right here is one of the features he'll selection so this will only be here if you have that resynthesizer plugin download it so I'll click on that that's going to bring up this little Python foo Hill selection dialog so I do have an entire tutorial dedicated to this tool I'm not going to go through this in-depth but basically we're just choosing how many pixels we want to grab from around the selection area we drew we're sampling from all around so everywhere not just the sides or the top or bottom which is the other two options and the filling order will keep set to random and I'll click OK there you can see that has erased that object there pretty quickly from our photo I'll hit control shift 8 to D so like that so of course this isn't perfect and I'm going to show you how to clean this up using some of the other techniques and we also haven't gotten rid of the shadow which once again will be another technique so the second technique for erasing anything from a photo in is going to be using the heel and clone tools so these tools are better for things like Spot Healing so you want to heal a smaller area of your photo or get rid of something like a speck of dust on your camera lens that showed up in the final photo I do have an entire tutorial dedicated to the heal tool which does also go over briefly the clone tool but in this particular case I'll hold ctrl and zoom in so it can be useful to use the heal and clone tools to clean up areas like this so I'll hit the H key to grab my heal tool and the heal tool is going to use an algorithm in order to take pixels from one area and paint them on the final area your destination area so I'm going to increase the size of my paintbrush here using the right bracket on my keyboard hold the ctrl key and click so that's going to grab an area of pixels that's the source area and now we can paint on our destination area and you'll see what the heal tool is going to do is it's just going to blend the areas from the source area with the destination area and help us get a better result there I do have my alignment set to none by the way and I'll come down here hold ctrl click to grab a source area so if I do lift up my mouse I will have to grab a new source area so hold ctrl click and you can see that is blending the seams and the other name for the heal tool is seamless cloning because it does help to blend scenes as opposed to the clone tool which tends to create seams so hold ctrl and zoom in this is where the clone tool is going to come in handy so if I hit the C key on my keyboard that'll grab my clone tool it's similar to the heal tool except it's not blending pixels from the surrounding areas it's not using an algorithm it's just directly copying the pixels from inside the source area and that comes in handy when you get closer to areas like this where you have to pixel areas that are totally different so we don't want the colors from this blending into this area because then it starts to look smudged so the clone tool helps us out with that a hold ctrl and zoom out so that's done a pretty good job of getting rid of that and I could continue on with this area here but I'm actually going to skip it that brings us to the third technique for removing anything from a photo in and that is going to be using a selection tool along with a layer mask and I'm going to scroll down here to the lower portion of my photo so now we're going to use this technique on the shadow that's right here that being said this technique is better for landscape areas of photos so in other words there's not a huge difference between what's going on in this area and what's going on in this area so landscape areas that are also fairly homogeneous as opposed to up here where you have quite a bit of differences in the landscape so this technique won't work as well up here so down here where things are pretty similar we can use this third technique so I'll hit the F key to grab my free select tool again so I'm going to try to outline as closely to the pebbles here this little pebble mound or rock mound whatever you want to call it but real quick I just want to turn on the feather edges option and we'll keep the radius set to 10 that'll help the result blend better here so there won't be as noticeable of a seam but now using our free select tool we're just going to trace around the rock area so hold control use my mouse wheel to zoom out a bit alright once we've connected those two points we'll hit the enter key to apply that once we've done that I'm going to come over here and duplicate my image layers so now we have two of these and a whole control zoom out a bit so next what I want to do is hit the M key to grab my move tool so we're on the top copy layer and I'm going to click and drag this layer over to the right while holding the control key that's going to ensure this drags in straight line mode and I'll release so here you can see what's going on we are moving this rock area to the right inside of the selection area and that's going to allow us to cover up what's happening here the shadow part and I'm actually going to move this back to the right slightly so we're gonna move this as little as humanly possible it's okay that there's a little sliver down here in the corner so hold ctrl zoom out so now what I'm going to do is come over here to this layer right click go to add layer mask under initialize layer mask - I'll choose selection and click add and there you can see that's added this little rock area here I'll hit ctrl shift a to deselect that and that's done a pretty good job of getting rid of the shadow that was on the original layer so whole control zoom in of course there's some areas that aren't completely perfect such as this area here that's kind of dipping now what we can do to fix that is come back over here to the layer as opposed to being on the layer mask and we'll hit the C key on the keyboard to grab the clone tool and I'm going to hold ctrl and click so that I'll grab an area just off here to the left hand side of this little dip area and then we can just paint and let me hold ctrl click so we can paint some of that back in and you do have to remember that there is a layer mask covering up this part so that's why we can't really see what's going on here the whole control click we're still going to try to draw this area in so if I come over here to the layer mask I'll hit the P key to grab my paintbrush reset this to black and white hit the X key to switch over to white and now I can simply paint on my layer mask and you'll see let me hit the X key to switch back we can paint this back in using black so now you can see we've done a pretty good job of getting rid of that little dip a whole control zoom out and a whole control zoom in remember there is a little sliver of black somewhere down here so let's hide this so it's right here so let's come back up here to my original layer so we're off the layer mask we'll hit the H key to grab the heal tool in this case because we are close to the edge if I use the heal tool and paint on the edge it's going to paint transparency we don't want that happening so all we have to do is click on our layer and then click this little alpha channel lock that'll ensure that this doesn't start painting transparency on our layer so then I'll hold the ctrl key click and we can paint with the heal tool near the edge here and that'll get rid of that little black spot so moving on to technique number four we're going to get into a bit more advanced stuff now I'm going to now decompose my image into the red green and blue color channels and then recompose the image once I have erased the objects I want to erase from my image so for starters I'm just going to put everything on the same layer so to do that I'll right click on here go to apply layer mask and then I'll click the merge down icon here in the layers panel that puts everything on the same layer next I'm going to make sure the layer is the same size as the overall canvas size so I'll go to layer layer to image size so obviously we've erased pretty much everything in this photo already but if I wanted to make more finite adjustments to this I can do so by going to colors components decompose so make sure the color model is set to RGB and I'll click OK so if I hold ctrl and zoom in you'll see we can still see some slight irregularities here in the consistency of the color of the sky and what decompose has done is it's taken the red green and blue color channels put them all on a grayscale layer and separated them so if I come over here to my color channels we have gray and alpha and let's come back over here to the layers panel this allows us to edit the very minor differences in colors that may have resulted from using the previous techniques so essentially this allows us to tidy things up a bit more and this can be useful because the irregularities can differ based on what color Channel you're on so if I come over here hide the red Channel you can see the green Channel doesn't have as much imperfections in the sky and if we hide both the red and green Channel we have just the blue Channel where once again you can see the imperfections aren't quite the same there so let's come back over here and unhide all these layers click on the red layer hit the H key on my keyboard hold ctrl zoom in so I'm just going to use the heal tool here to get rid of these imperfections so I'm going to hold the ctrl key and click and here you can see we're getting rid of these seams so because we're only working on the red color Channel this is only going to be blending colors from that color channel as opposed to blending all the colors from across the entire image and now let's hide the red Channel we'll come back here to the green Channel and we'll do the same thing until these imperfections have disappeared finally let's hide the green Channel come over here to the blue channel make sure you're clicked on it so this one's much more faint if you wanted to you could decrease the opacity of this tool if you wanted there to be less of an effect used here so you want the effect to be more subtle and a whole control zoom-out and I'll come over here shift click on the show/hide icon so now you can see those very minor imperfections that occurred are now gone and we can come back up here to colors components recompose and if I come back over here to the original composition you can see now the sky looks a lot more smooth so control Z that's before control Y that's after the final technique for this tutorial on how to remove anything from a photo in is going to be the wavelet decompose method so for this method let's come back here to this image and this image actually already has all the adjustments made to it so let's open up the original file open recent and here is the original photo I'll hit convert hold ctrl zoom in so I've removed the blemishes from his face as well as some of the wrinkles so that's what this technique is best at its best at removing those finer details those finer imperfections blemishes wrinkles etc from a photo and it does so by separating various layers of details from your photo so let me show you this tool in action this is directly built in a so we'll go to filters enhance wavelet decompose if you're a beginner I recommend going with three scales if you're intermediate you can go 5 and if you're an expert you can go with 7 but let's stick with 3 for this tutorial and I'll click OK so what this has done is its separated various layers of detail from the image and we can see that over here under the decomposition layer group and if I hide the residual layer which is essentially the composited layer or the final image you can see what this is done here and if you've ever used the high pass filter you know this is pretty similar to what the high pass filter does it's separating the details from the layer by using contrast around the edges of those details and here we have scale one two and three so if I hide scale three and two you'll see scale one contains the finer details of the image scale two contains sort of the medium details and then scale 3 is going to be the larger details when you combine these you get the fully constructed map here of all of the details as I mentioned you can get rid of things like wrinkles etc using this so with the heal tool I'm going to decrease the size of my brush and I'm going to come over here and unhide the residual layer so another benefit of this technique is you can see what you're doing directly on the image as you're doing it so if I hold ctrl and click I'm working on scale 3 because the wrinkle is considered a larger detail if I use my heal tool and paint on this you can see that's going to help reduce the appearance of that wrinkle so if i shift-click that's before shift-click that's after if I wanted to remove more of this wrinkle I could come up to the scale to layer and we can do the same thing and you'll see that that will start to erase the finer portions of this wrinkle and by the way make sure your sample merged option is turned off when you're doing this otherwise it's going to take pixels from all the layers below whereas we just want to take pixels from the layer we're on so I think we've sufficiently removed that wrinkle let's say we want to remove some of this other stuff here so hold ctrl zoom in if I wanted to just remove the discoloration that's occurring here around this blemish I can come over here to the residual layer hold ctrl and click decrease the size of this and now when I paint on here you'll see it's going to help smooth out the skin tones make them more even looking but it's going to keep that texture so that can help that look more realistic but if you wanted to also get rid of the texture of course you can come back to these scale layers using the heal tool and that'll help get rid of some of that and you can move up to these scale to layer and do the same thing and let's come back to the residual layer we can also work on making this part of the skin look a bit more even like so hold ctrl zoom out so come down here shift-click there's the original and let's grab the move tool shift-click there is the final result there I only did some minor tweaks to this photo but you can see that's a great way to remove smaller imperfections while also keeping the texture from the original image that's it for this tutorial if you liked it you could check out my you channel at youtube.com slash Davies media design don't forget to subscribe and click the bell icon to be notified each time I have a brand new tutorial you can check out any of the links to my resources in the description of the video but thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 78,736

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, GIMP 2020

Id: yNzIHrsmeIw

Length: 18min 49sec (1129 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 19 2020