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Object removal 101: The secret to professional photo editing!
Clone stamp/Healing/Object Fill Remove are powerful photo editing tools that allow professional edits. I share how to properly use them in Lightroom and Google Photos using the Magic Eraser.
🔗 Chamonix Photo Editing Series https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6kUdfoIX4tw8_BC7ap3eh_cqizopAxek
🔗 Free Presets! https://loicbellemarealford.ca/store/presets/free-lightroom-presets/
🔗 Photos https://loicbellemarealford.ca/photography/2023/03/chamonix-lyon-full-album/
► WATCH NEXT
- Sony A7 IV Review https://youtu.be/54Ym0qk8mIc
- My iPad ruined my trip! https://youtu.be/2qUdSz79df4
► COME SAY HI!
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#clonestamptool #magiceraser #photoediting
► CHAPTERS
00:00 Introduction
00:55 Different tools available
01:30 Lightroom: Content Aware Remove
02:13 Lightroom: Healing Tool
03:22 Lightroom: Clone Stamp Tool
03:57 A VERY IMPORTANT TIP!
04:39 Using my phone for content removal!
04:59 Magic Eraser on the Google Pixel 6 Pro
06:57 When to use object removal tools?
07:42 Reason #1: To use the object removal tools
08:32 Reason #2: To use the object removal tools
09:34 Reason #3: To use the object removal tools
11:26 Link to photos & free presets!
12:21 Conclusion - Thanks for watching!
► MY MUSIC
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- 0:00 Introduction
- 0:55 Different tools available
- 1:30 Lightroom: Content Aware Remove
- 2:13 Lightroom: Healing Tool
- 3:22 Lightroom: Clone Stamp Tool
- 3:57 A VERY IMPORTANT TIP!
- 4:39 Using my phone for content removal!
- 4:59 Magic Eraser on the Google Pixel 6 Pro
- 6:57 When to use object removal tools?
- 7:42 Reason #1: To use the object removal tools
- 8:32 Reason #2: To use the object removal tools
- 9:34 Reason #3: To use the object removal tools
- 11:26 Link to photos & free presets!
- 12:21 Conclusion - Thanks for watching!
hello everyone welcome to the second part of this series where I talk about how I edit the photos that I took during my ski trip in shamani France in the second part of this series we're going to talk about a super powerful tool which is a clone stamp tool the healing tool or the content order tool depending on what you want to call it this is really a tool I can make a photo that is almost perfect become perfect so it's a really useful one to know let's get started by Rolling the intro maker on a journey to become better at this site I want to quickly start by reminding you that even though I'm using a MacBook Pro 16 inch and Lightroom put in my photos you can use whatever device you have so it could be a phone it could be a tablet and you could use a complete different software like my favorite free photo editor polar photo editor okay so let's Jump Right In here and talk about the different tools that you have for healing cone stamping content aware really it doesn't matter what you want to call it here so we're going to look at this first photo here we're going to see that I applied a bunch of healing inside of the photo this is one of my favorite shots but I did work quite a lot to get it to this point but let's actually go to another photo because I think I have a better example for these different types of tools so if you look at this photo here what I mainly did was removing the lamp post which I remove it here we can see that we have two lamp posts here and I remove them just to make little image look a little bit cleaner right here so here I'm gonna reset completed the photo here and we're going to go through the different options right here so first of all we have content aware removed this is very similar to people that use Photoshop where it's called content aware field so you can simply come here and then set the size here I'm actually using my two fingers to zoom in in and out little trick to change the size quickly and then you can simply paint over what you want to disappear um so here it's going to do a job and it's going to try and replace it automatically here we see there's a little part right here that where we still have this sign so I can come here change the size go through remove it here and this is used as an algorithm to try and find what is the best thing to replace here it works in this case you can click on it click on delete and we can try redoing it again and we're going to see if it works or not this time around um it worked it's not perfect and we're going to look at it in another tool that we have right here so we could come here at the top right here and try removing this but we're going to look at the second tool here which is healing healing is very different compared to content aware Continental tries to do everything automatically from here here it is a more of a manual process so here first of all I'm going to set the size to something that can cover the lamp post right here but we also have a feather so if you look at the side here of your indication you're going to see that you have a feather around which is basically uh where you're going to be 100 of the opacity or that you're changing and something that is less so if we select here and we just paint over this lamp post here we're going to say that software automatically tries and finds something that looks similar to this part but then we can go here and we can actually play around and try and find exactly what works here and looks natural and this is much better than contouring over field because like I said something to wear a fail it's automatic it tries to find the best part for you or here it does try and find the best part but lets you tweak it a little bit better peeling here is really important when you're doing things on faces or things like that because it's going to take the colors and the Luminosity of the things around and try and adapt what you're cloning here to be somewhat similar finally the last option we have right here so let's go here it's going to be our close time tool so if you want to come here and want to remove this last part of the post right here we can use the Clone stamp tool and again here it's trying to find parts of the image that could be used to replace this again here might be a little bit hard using the stamp tool because chromosome 2 simply takes one part and directly applies the simulator somewhere else so if the Luminosity or something like that is different it can be hard using the Clone stamp tool here to remove it so actually I'm going to go back here and use the content aware at your place we're going to come here use this and like you saw another thing I've been doing here that's actually pretty important is I've been doing the whole Post in different steps and using different tools a lot of the time when you want to remove some objects you have to do it small part by small part to completely remove the object and you have to use different tools to get the best results trying to remove the whole post using only one tool probably won't work like if you look at this here now actually looks pretty natural it looks pretty good but let's say I removed everything and only use the content aware remove it's probably not going to look that good because there's just too much for the algorithm to figure out how to replace everything so here it doesn't look natural it doesn't look good it's clear I replace something and when you replace something you want to make sure that it looks natural as if you didn't do anything okay for some saying I don't have the fancy software like Lightroom to it in my photos this is not a problem at all I'm going to show you how you can do it using your phone right here so inside of Google photos I have an option to remove it but there's a bunch of other software that can also do that you can can find inside of the app store or the Play Store so the first picture we're going to come here is going to look at this one we're going to see my sister is there and actually Google photos has a tool that is called a magic eraser I think it only works on the new pixel phones that's a little bit sad but it's really cool because you can simply Circle something you want to get rid of the AI is going to detect it and you can remove somebody that easily again you might have to retouch it a few times just to get good results but you can see here that my sister completely disappeared from the picture it's kind of crazy that if we look at before and after we're gonna see that she was there and then she's gone afterwards that's kind of crazy how easy it is to do you can look at a few other examples I'm just going to describe the edit right here sure I'd say we want to have only my sister at the top of the mountain here I can come inside of edit I can go inside of tools Magic Eraser let it analyze the scene I can come in the back right here I can delete everyone right here just by clicking on them and again there's a bunch of different apps that can do exactly the same thing I'm doing I forgot right here this person [Music] done [Music] looks pretty good now and my sister is now alone at the top of the mountain which is pretty cool couldn't do that in the past and this is using technology to really help your pictures become better I want to show a bit of a more impressive example here because up to now they were pretty easy people to remove and the backgrounds are not that yeah hard to remove but let's come on this one let's go in Magic Eraser and actually detected towards people and the scenes that we might want to remove and I can simply click on the different peoples here again here [Music] and then nobody else in the picture that's kind of crazy super easy to do again there's other apps that you can use it's not just Google that has this feature this one is just built in inside of your phone so definitely possible to do whatever type of device you're using to edit your photos now I want to go through a few examples and talk about when you will be using these tools and why they are so powerful so let's go back to the example I had previously and look at why I use the Clone stamp tool here so if you come here and we hide the cone stamp tool we're gonna see there's a bunch of dust spots that appeared on my sensor and this just made this picture not as clean and not as good looking as it should so I went through and using the healing tool mostly remove all of the different dots around here also in the bottom corner right here on the side it was a little Annoying Thing so I decided here and used I think it was the healing tool to remove that spot and just made the click the picture look cleaner in the end so the first reason you want to do this is just to make sure your images are nice and clean and there's nothing that shouldn't be there inside of the shots if you're wondering how to go quicker to remove all of these spots because there was a lot right there there's actually a tool on the side of Lightroom that's pretty cool you can click on visualized spots right here actually I have to reset it for the it to work and then we're going to see all the little spots that appear here so then it's super simple just simply using a healing brush usually I like having the feather almost completely up and then you can simply go through and click on all the different dust spots here and they're all going to be removed so it takes time it's annoying definitely better to clean your sensor but I don't know why my sensor was so dirty in this picture and I had to do this for this shot so let's go to the next example right here and this one right here is actually a pretty cool example another thing I might remove from shots is things that are created by humans so usually there's some controversy about removing some things from the pictures because it can be considered as manipulating pictures and not being true to the scene but sometimes things that people or humans add inside of the Landscapes just make them look worse so in that case I don't really have a prime removing something that's created by a human so for example the example we had right here I removed the length post just to make it look cleaner and a little bit less distracting the next example right here is actually removing humans so that's what we did with my pixel phone but we're also going to do it right here because if you look at the original version here there's a bunch of people at the bottom here and they were really distracting for the photos I wanted to have the skill of the people here in the big mountains background but it didn't want other distraction in front here with all these little people going down the slopes if you look at the next picture it's very similar idea here I cleaned up the picture first of all cleaned up some of the Dust spots at the top here remove this here at the bottom and then remove all of the posts that we had at the bottom here again just making the whole picture look a little bit cleaner in the end if comes the next one here we're going to see again I just did the small correction here to remove a dust spot I did that through most of the pictures and now the next point is one that's much more interesting and it's a lot of the time we look at pictures a very important thing to do is make sure that your edges look nice and clean and there's no distraction around on the edges so for example in this case right here if you look there was a house at the bottom here and it was just a little bit distracting on that area so I decided to clone in some trees to make them disappear and make the whole shot look better I don't think it's my best clothes stamp here but it looks good enough a better example is this one right here so it looks really good right this but if we disable the Clone stop and healing tools right here we're going to see there's a bunch of little things all around the shot that I just removed to make the whole shot look better again they're not big things they're not huge things that are moving they don't really change the scene in the end so that's why I don't really feel bad about doing this it's just getting a cleaner shot in the end the next one here is actually very interesting this is one of my favorite shots from that trip but there was a very annoying rock at the bottom here so if we remove it here there was actually not a rock it seems to be just some ice and didn't look that good so just I cleaned it up by using the Clone stamp tool I think or the healing tool right here and just make it cleaner again there was more desktops at the top so I removed those two finally the last one right here again very small thing I removed on the side here and simply there was some chimney fumes or something like that not sure how they're called they were coming out and we're just distracting here so I decided to go through and remove them just to make the picture look a little better so you can see that most example here they're not huge change in I'm not changing everything inside of the picture but using a clone stamp tool can just make the picture look simpler it can clean up your sides and can just improve the overall image by making these small little tweaks it's also very important if you have some dust spots or things like that to go through and remove all of them I passed like four or five hours going for on my picture and removing all the dust spots so that was annoying but this is why all of these tools are very very important to know when you're editing your photos like for the other videos inside of this series I'm gonna have a link down in the description with all of the photos in Full Resolution where you can compare them with the original version the version of the presets then the Clone stamping applied and finally the masking which you will be the subject of the last video here if you want to get my free presets you can go down and click on the link down in the description and you're gonna have to subscribe to my newsletter to get the free presets but it means that there's only one I'm gonna send out every month or so I don't really want to be annoying with it I just want to give a recap so it could be some photos from my website it could be some content from YouTube from Instagram or different places just give a recap of what I've been up to in the last month and sometimes if I have something cool to share I might share a few more during the months but really I'm going to try and keep less emails as possible so definitely go check out the link down description for the photos and also to subscribe to my new list newsletter and get their free preset if you want to know how we use the preset go back and level as in my previous video where I go all about how other presets how I use them how I create them and all of that good stuff if you enjoyed the video please let me know by hitting the like button below and definitely subscribe for the next episode of this series and see you in the next one thank you
What is this video about?
Object removal tools are genuinely transformative when editing photos. In this video, I break down the three main approaches you have in Lightroom—Content Aware Remove, the Healing Tool, and the Clone Stamp—and show exactly how each one works, when to reach for it, and why the choice matters.
The key insight I learned editing photos from my ski trip to Chamonix is that removing objects almost always requires multiple tools and multiple passes. You rarely nail a removal with just one approach. Content Aware tries to figure everything out automatically and works fast, but the Healing Tool gives you way more control—it finds similar textures for you but lets you tweak them. The Clone Stamp is the most manual but gives you complete precision. Chaining these together, working small section by small section, is what makes the final result look natural.
If you don't have Lightroom, I also show how to do all this on your phone. Google Photos' Magic Eraser is remarkable—it uses AI to detect and remove objects instantly, and it works on any compatible phone. There are other similar apps in the app store and play store too.
I then walk through real examples from that trip showing the three main reasons I use object removal: cleaning up dust spots from your sensor (this matters more than you think), removing distracting elements like lamp posts or other people from the scene, and refining the edges to eliminate small visual noise that pulls attention away. The third one surprises people—it's not about radical transformation; it's about subtle tweaks that collectively make a photo feel cleaner and more intentional.
I've also got the full-resolution before-and-after photos from this series linked in the description if you want to study the edits in detail, plus my free Lightroom presets. Check the previous video in this series if you want to learn how I actually built and use those presets.