by Michael Collins
Texas School Instructor
Have you been working on a project for a while and found that you now hate the Clone Stamp Tool, or the Spot Healing Brush? Yep, I have for sure. Adobe introduced a magical tool in Photoshop 2023. It was the Remove Tool. It was “OK” in the beginning. In Photoshop 2024 and Especially Photoshop 2025 it a pure magic.
You can remove many things that annoy you with the click of a mouse or a tap of the pen. 99% of the time it will fill in your area cleanly and efficiently in one stroke. Sometimes it will take two or three strokes or taps to make it look perfect.
If you haven’t seen this magical tool it is located with the Healing Brush, etc. – the keyboard shortcut is “J.” However, I personally have removed the Remove Tool from there and put it in its own part of the toolbar and changed the Keyboard shortcut to the letter “R” as I think “R” works better than “J” for Remove. Photoshop comes with the “R” tool as Rotate which I never use.
In both sets of samples, the left image shows what I want to remove. The center image shows the Remove Tool in action, showing what I selected to remove. The image on the right shows the final product two seconds after hitting the return key.
In Photoshop 2025, Adobe upgraded the Remove Tool with “Find Distractions.” This includes people and wires and cables. Super easy to use, just click on Find Distractions then pick the one you wish to delete. With wires and cables, you just click and wait for them to disappear. With Removing people, you click on “People” and it finds and highlights people. You can take out the people you want to keep or hit enter and take out everything selected.
I shot an image of the Lincoln Memorial a while back and used the new Remove people portion of the Remove Tool to remove the people who had the audacity to be in my photo. As with the above samples, the left image shows the people. The center image shows the Remove Tool in action and the right image shows the people removed. It’s not perfect, and requires a little clean up, but, wow, is it MAGIC!
To watch a video on the Remove Tool, go to my YouTube Channel:
Michael Collins has been a professional photographer for more than 25 years and has served on the board of directors for the Professional Photographers of California, becoming President in 2007-2008. He will be teaching “Photoshop, 0 to 60 in a Week” at the 2025 Texas School of Professional Photography. Learn more about him and his class at: Michael Collins – Texas School of Professional Photography.
