Lightroom Classic’s Distraction Removal panel can easily get overlooked. But rather than spend time manually cloning out dust spots or unwanted passers-by with the cloning and healing tools or AI Remove tool, take a look at the Distraction Removal panel first.
It uses AI to automate tasks you might previously have done manually – so no more brushing, no more object selection, just one-click fixes for three common photo-editing scenarios.
Remove mode
This is the mode you need for any image retouching or object removal jobs in Lightroom. The top panel, just called ‘Remove’, is where you’ll find the regular Heal, Clone and AI Remove tools.
The Heal tool has always been useful for blotting out sensor spots, while the Clone tool is still best for pinpoint image repairs where you need to copy nearby details under full control over the size of the repair, the source area and the brush properties.
Distraction Removal
This is the second panel in the Remove mode and it has three sections: Reflections, People and Dust. These are normally collapsed, so if you select one the others shrink back to just the title, but we’re showing them all open here.
Between them, these three Distraction Removal options cover a lot of the everyday retouching scenarios that photographers are faced with.
Reflections
Have you ever photographed a display through a shop window or display case but had the picture ruined by reflections? This tool will automatically find any reflections in your photo – no need for any manual masking – and will subdue the reflection while magically revealing the objects behind the glass.
Like many of Adobe’s AI tools, this sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t – but when it does, it’s like magic
People
This tool tackles a problem faced by every travel or architectural photographer: the scene is filled with passers-by. It would take an age to remove everyone in this shot manually and there are few ‘clean’ areas to clone from – but the ‘People’ Distraction Removal tool does an amazing job, identifying practically every figure then removing them almost invisibly.
This is another tool where you just have to try it and see. I have another shot of the same scene from a slightly different angle where it didn’t work well at all, mainly because it couldn’t figure out complex stepped railings and other irregular objects in the background.
People masking
As soon as you open the People panel, Lightroom will scan the image for people and highlight them with a red mask overlay. All you need to now is hit the Remove button and Lightroom will erase all these people from the scene.
Don’t worry if the mask doesn’t follow the outline of people closely – it’s using surrounding regions, not just the figures themselves.
Keeping people in
The People tool will highlight people and groups of people with a red mask overlay – but very often this is not one mask but several, so that you may see a series of mask ‘pins’ dotted around the image. You can select these individually and delete them if you want to keep these people or groups of people in the scene.
If you are selecting some people for removal and others to keep in, it’s probably going to be easier to use the regular tools in the Remove panel.
Dust
The Reflections and People tools are attempting to achieve complex adjustments that sometimes work well and sometimes don’t. The Dust tool, though, is so effective that you can forget about manually blotting out sensor spots and use this instead. It will even show you spots you hadn’t seen with the naked eye.
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