Photoshop removes anything instantly with General Distractions
Detect and remove distractions in a photo with Photoshop ai tool, General Distractions
The latest addition to the remove tool is General Distractions, available right now in Photoshop Beta.Â
With the remove tool, we can simply paint over areas to remove them. This tool may or may not use ai (we can set the options). There are auto detect options that include remove People, wires and cables and now, the General Distractions options. The remove tool and these options do NOT require Generative Credits.
Let’s have a look shall we?
Choose the remove tool in the toolbox.
Under Mode, choose the option to use Generative ai or not.
Click at the top and choose Find Distractions
Click on Find in General Distractions
You will see a progress bar as Photoshop analyzes the image.
All the detected areas will have colored overlays.
Once again, click  Find distractions to open the General distractions panel.
Here you can see a list of the detected objects. It can detect more types of objects, but only the ones that appear in the image will be shown.
We will look at the options in a moment. For now, let’s just see how it works.
Press the checkmark, or the Enter key to apply. I noticed, it can take a while for it to register that you applied it.
As you can see General Distractions did a good job of removing everything that was highlighted.
General Distractions, doesn’t remove people, because we have a separate, remove people option. Let’s Remove people too.
Notice that it doesn’t just highlight the people, it also highlights their shadow. This isn’t brand new, but it’s a more recent addition.
Apply and the people are removed.
There are little bits of fence left over. These can be removed by painting with the remove tool.
After, you can see everything has been removed.
(In a real shoot, I wouldn’t remove the fence on this image.  I’d also adjust the composition—like moving forward—but here we’re focusing on using the Photoshop tool and this image is good to demonstrate that.)
A closer look at General Distraction features.
Let’s use this photo of downtown Waikiki Beach, Honolulu to see some different types of distractions.
Grab the Remove tool>Find Distractions>General Distractions.
Now, we see different types of things highlighted.
You can turn off the objects you don’t want to remove. In the real world, I wouldn’t remove things like the traffic lights.
Sometimes a highlight is difficult to see. You can change the highlight color of any distraction by clicking on the color swatch.
The color picker appears and you can choose any color you like.
If you want to manually remove part of a distraction, you can hold down the Alt (Windows) / Option (Mac) key and paint away the areas to exclude.
You can also paint over any areas to include.
Here we applied the adjustment to test how well it works.
If you wanted to remove all the people, use the remove tool. If you have multiple shots, the best way is to use the Layers stacks trick to remove people.Â
I hope you enjoyed this tutorial, drop a comment and let me know if you would use this tool.
If you are looking to get serious about learning Photoshop, check out my Flagship Course on Photoshop 2026.Â
See you next week with another new tutorial!
Colin
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