Welcome back to another very exciting tutorial here at the PhotoshopTrainingChannel.com.
My name is Jesus Ramirez and you can find me on Twitter @JRfromPTC.
In this video, I'm going to show you how to remove power lines from a photograph using
the Spot Healing Brush Tool and the Pen Tool.
And before we get started with the tutorial, I want to quickly mention why I'm creating
this video.
Some of you may know that I put out a Photoshop Tip of the Day and I publish it on all my
social media accounts and on my website.
I also send out an email every Monday morning recapping the previous week's tip of the day.
In this, last week, I sent out an email and I got a lot of replies because there were
some confusion with one of those tips.
And when I reread the tip of the day, I realized that I made a mistake and it confused a lot
of people, so I decided to create a video on that tip of the day to, sort of, clear
up some of the confusion.
Also, if you're not a member of my newsletter, and you want to subscribe, so that you receive
the Tip of the Day newsletter every Monday and an email whenever I publish a tutorial,
you can subscribe at PhotoshopTrainingChannel.com, or if it's easier for you, PTCvids.com.
They both get you to my website, and you can enter your email on the box that you'll see
at the very top.
But, anyway, in this tutorial, we're going to be using the Spot Healing Brush Tool and
that's going to allow us to remove the power lines from this image.
We're going to create a new layer to work non-destructively.
Make sure that Sample All Layers is selected in the Options bar and, also, that you have
Content Aware selected.
That way, when we paint, using the Spot Healing Brush Tool, Photoshop is going to generate
the pixels that it thinks it should go in that area, and it's also going to generate
them in a new layer.
That way, we don't destroy the original image.
I'm going to press Ctrl Alt Z, Command Option Z on the Mac, to Undo, and in the Tip of the
Day, I showed how to remove the power lines using the Pen Tool and stroking with a path.
But before we get into that, I want to show you how to remove the power lines by using
the Shift key.
So, maybe, you want to remove the power lines that are along the side of the building here,
so I'm going to reduce the size of my Spot Healing Brush here by using the left bracket
key on the keyboard, and just making it slightly larger than the power line.
In this case, it's a cable that's just attached to the wall, but I do want to remove it.
So I'm going to click, hold Shift and click, and that's going to create a straight line
from the first point to the second point, and you can keep repeating that step until
you reach the end of the power line.
And if you have a Wacom tablet, another thing that you can do is just simply freehand the
removal of that power line.
So I'm going to make the brush a little bit larger, here, and just paint using my Wacom
tablet.
So that's another way of removing the power line.
Now, the example that I used in the Tip of the Day was by using the Pen Tool, and the
reason that you may want to use the Pen Tool to create a path and then stroking it is in
situations where holding Shift is not an option, maybe, because the object that you're trying
to move is a little more complicated than a straight line, or you don't have a Wacom
tablet and you can't simply just create a straight line by painting on your tablet.
So, I'm going to click on the Pen Tool.
Before I actually start creating new points, I want you to make sure that under the rubber
band, here, make sure that you have this box checked, and that's because when you have
that box checked, and you click, Photoshop is going to show you a preview of how the
path is going to look.
If I don't have that checked, you won't get that.
So, you see that line coming off that point.
I'm going to Undo that.
Now, I'm going to disable rubber band.
I’m going to click.
Notice that the preview is no longer there.
So it makes it a little difficult to figure out how your path is going to look before
you set the point.
So, just make sure you have Rubber Band enabled.
So what you want to do is follow the power line as close as you can, so click and drag,
and then, click and drag again at this area here and if you lay a point down, and it's
not exactly where you wanted it, you can always hold the space bar, keep holding it, and you
can drag that point around.
When you move it to a different area, you can release the space bar and the point will
now be in that new area.
So I'm just trying to match this power line as best as I can.
Once you get to the end, to close the path, just press the Esc key on the keyboard and
that will close the path.
If you made a mistake, you can always go into the Direct Selection Tool, and just select
the point that you want to adjust, and you can click and drag on those handles to better
match the shape of that power line.
I know that it seems a very complicated process but I'm talking and giving instructions as
I go.
Usually, this would have taken just a couple of seconds to create.
So, now, that we have the path selected, you can go into the Paths panel and you'll see
the work path here.
If you don't see the Paths panel, you can go into Window and make sure that Path is
checked, and you may see it somewhere in the right side, here, with the rest of the panels.
So, select the Work path and you can either click on this icon here and choose Stroke
Path, or you can directly right click on it if you're using either of these tools—the
Path Selection Tool or the Direct Selection Tool—and you can just right click on it
with the Path enabled.
So Path is enabled, right click on it, and you can click on Stroke Path.
Both of those options will get you this window, and you can select any of these tools to stroke
that path.
In our case, we're going to use the Spot Healing Brush Tool.
And, before we do that, let's make sure that the size of the brush is appropriate.
So, right now, the brush is pretty big as you can see.
It's a lot bigger than the power lines, so I'm going to use the left bracket key to reduce
the size of this brush.
So, something like 9 or 10 pixels will be good.
I'll leave it at 10, then I'll stroke the path.
So I'm going to go into the Paths panel, click on the path, go into the fly out menu and
choose Stroke Path.
Spot Healing Brush Tool is selected, then I'm going to press okay.
Notice what happened.
Photoshop automatically stroked that path using this tool and the power line was removed.
I'm going to press Ctrl H, Command H on the Mac, to hide that path, and we can see the
result.
I'm going to come back into the Layers panel and this was a non-destructive effect, as
you can see, because we are working on this layer.
It's generating the new pixels, and that power line is now gone.
You can do the same thing for the second one.
I'm going to go a little bit faster this time, but before I get started, actually, I'm going
to go into the paths panel, and just delete this path.
I hit the delete key on the keyboard, just so we don't get them confused when we're stroking
them.
So I'm going to go back into the Layers panel, and I'm going to quickly create this path.
Then, I'm going to see what the appropriate size would be.
Ten is too small in this case, so it looks like, maybe, 15 will be good, so I'll leave
it there, and I'm going to Stroke this path, and I'm going to press Ctrl H, Command H on
the Mac, to hide, and you see how that power line was removed.
If I Zoom In, you will see that I missed a couple of spots there, but that's okay.
I can use the Spot Healing Brush Tool and just simply brush those areas away.
And you can actually use the Spot Healing Brush Tool if you really care for it.
If you create one continuous stroke like that, you, probably, won't do a good job.
But if you create smaller strokes like that, you can do a better job, and once you get
to the edge it's going to be really difficult, so, maybe, using something like the Clone
Stamp Tool would be better.
And select the source by holding Alt, Option on the Mac, and clone out the edge, like so.
So I'm going to fit this to screen so you can see the before and the after.
And, of course, there are some areas in this image that need a little bit of work, like
this area here, but I think that you get the overall idea.
You can use the Spot Healing Brush Tool to remove power lines from images by either clicking
on them while holding Shift and creating straight lines, or by simply using freehand brush strokes,
or using the Pen Tool, creating paths and healing more complicated areas.
And that's it for this tutorial.
I hope that you enjoyed it and that you learned something new.
If you have any comments or questions, leave them down below.
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Thank you for watching and I'll talk to you again soon.