Object Remover

Guide: removing small distractions cleanly with Object Remover

How the fill works

Object Remover uses a classic image-processing technique called diffusion inpainting, not a generative AI model. After you brush over an area and click Erase, every brushed pixel is repeatedly replaced with the average of its neighbours. Over 220 passes, colours from the edges of the brushed area flow inwards and blend together, so the object is replaced with a smooth patch that matches the surrounding colours.

This is why the tool is excellent on plain, smooth surroundings and weaker on textured ones. It blends colours; it does not invent patterns, so it cannot recreate brick lines, leaves, fabric weave or text behind an object. On a very wide area the centre may not fully blend in one go, leaving a faint trace of the object.

Good jobs for this tool

This tool is meant for your own photos. Removing watermarks, logos or photographer credits from other people's images can infringe copyright, so do not use it for that.

• The orange date stamp in the corner of old camera prints and scans.
• Dust spots, hair and small scratches on scanned family photos, before running Old Photo Restoration.
• A small bird, wire or speck of litter against sky, sand, water or a plain wall.
• A pimple-sized spot or stray thread on a product photo with a plain background.
• Sensor dust spots on DSLR photos of the sky.

Brushing technique that gives cleaner fills

The brush size slider ranges from 5 to 60 pixels in radius. Choose a size just a little larger than the object's thickness and paint over it with a small margin, so no outline of the object is left at the edge. Leftover edge pixels get pulled into the fill and leave a shadow.

Work in small pieces. Erasing one small area at a time gives a better result than painting a huge region at once, because each fill has nearby edges to borrow from. The tool keeps your previous erases, so you can brush the next spot and click Erase again. If you paint in the wrong place, use Clear Brush to remove the selection before erasing.

Output size and format

To keep brushing and filling fast, photos larger than 1400 pixels on the longest side are scaled down to 1400 pixels when you load them, and the download is a PNG at that working size. For a large camera photo this means the result is smaller than the original. If you need a specific size or a smaller file, follow up with the Image Resizer or PNG to JPG. For people or large objects, cropping them out with the Crop tool is often cleaner than erasing.

When a fill looks smudged

A blurry patch where the object used to be is the most common complaint with this kind of fill, and it usually has one of three causes. The brushed area may be too big, so the colours from the edges have too far to travel. The background may have texture, so a smooth patch stands out against it. Or the brush may have touched a different coloured area, such as the line where a wall meets the floor, and the two colours have mixed.

Try brushing a smaller area, stopping the brush just short of any strong edge, and erasing that edge region separately. On texture, a small fill is often invisible once the photo is viewed at normal size, so judge it at the size people will actually see it. If the object is large or sits in front of a face or a pattern, cropping is usually the better answer.

Before you start

• You took the photo yourself or have permission to edit it.
• The thing you want to remove is small compared with the photo.
• The area around it is fairly plain: sky, wall, floor, sand or paper.
• The file is PNG, JPG or WEBP (convert HEIC with HEIC to JPG).
• You are fine with a PNG result of up to 1400 pixels on the longest side.

Related guides

• How to Remove Unwanted Objects From Photos With AI
• How to Restore an Old Photo With AI