Processing for Birds – Removing those unwanted distractions

Last Updated on August 1, 2019 by Kevin B Agar

In a perfect bird photography world the subject would be nicely composed, well exposed and sharp with a nice out of focus background. If only that was always the case. Usually there are distracting elements in the shot, such as these

Blue Tit

There are several ways to remove them, including cloning, patching and healing. I’ve tried them all with a limited amount of success. Well now there’s content aware fill. Using the spot healing brush tool set to content aware fill works very well but does leave areas at the edge of the image that are not quite right as in the image below

Blue Tit

A much better way to remove the distractions is using the lasso tool.

Select the offending objects with the lasso tool by holding down the shift key and selecting each item in turn to get this

You now need to go to the menu at the top and select edit>fill, or use the keyboard shortcut Shift F5, and use the setting below

The important thing is to check the box ‘Color Adaption’ Now hit OK and you get the following result

Ctrl D to deselect the selection and then you can complete your processing of the image, sharpening, resizing etc to get the end result

Blue Tit

I found this method on the internet so thought I would post an example using it. I hope this is of some help to some of you. I was using Photoshop CC2014 but I seem to remember that it’s available from CS5, but correct me if I’m wrong. Any questions then please don’t hesitate to ask them.

© 2003-2024 Kevin B Agar

One comment on “Processing for Birds – Removing those unwanted distractions
  1. Kevin B Agar Kevin B Agar says:

    Added the keyboard shortcut

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