Logo removal with the Patch tool

- [Instructor] An essential portrait retouching skill to have in your bag of tricks is the ability to remove graphics or logos from your portraits. Because often these can distract away from the subject. And this is true whether we're photographing a kid on the left, a model in the middle, or professional surfer on the far right. So let's look at a few techniques that we can use in order to remove logos or graphics. Starting of with the image over here on the left I'll press F to go to full screen mode and zoom in a touch. This is a portrait that I captured of one of my daughters best friends while we were camping.

And you can see there's a logo on her jacket. I want to remove that so I can create more of a timeless portrait. And a couple of ways that we can do that is with the Patch Tool or the Clone Stamp Tool. Let's begin by taking a look at the Patch Tool. To work with the Patch Tool often you want to duplicate your layer. So here I'll drag the background layer to the new layer icon, and I'll name this new layer patch. Next up is to select the Patch Tool over in the tools panel. Now once you select this tool you do have two options here. You can use a Patch Tool as Normal or Content Aware.

Content Aware works really good where you have textures, which sort of randomizes those or blends those in. Normal will actually work a little bit better in this situation because we have a really distinct or defined pattern of the fabric of the jacket. So here I'll use Normal. Then next what you do is you simply click n' drag to create a selection around the object that you want to remove. In this case this little logo that we have here on the jacket. Let me zoom in on that a little bit so you can select that a touch better. We also have a diffusion value setting.

Diffusion determines our edge detail. So I'm going to go ahead and lower that so I have a little more of a defined edge. Then you click and drag this to a good source area and let go. And what it does is it patches that on top of what was there. If we go to select and deselect, you can see how removed that logo really successfully and that looks great. Now another way we can do the same thing is with the Clone Stamp Tool. So, create a new layer and I'll go ahead and name this one Clone Stamp. To work with the Clone Stamp Tools we've seen, we can grab the Clone Stamp Tool.

The next up in the options bar, we'll leave her opacity at 100, align turned on, sample all layers. And hear we'll just option or alt+click above. That's option+click on a Mac, alt+click on Windows. And just click and paint over that. In this way, again, we have another way to remove the logo from that area of the image. Now the question often comes up, well, which technique is best. Well it really depends upon the image, and the subject, and the lighting, and all those things. So, really what you want to know is a couple of different techniques and then try them.

If the results aren't very good, well then move to another technique and see if it can look even better. Alright, well that raps up our look at how we can do this with this image. Let's move to the second image and let's do that in the next movie.