Remove People in Adobe Camera RAW – ACR

Colin Smith

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Remove People in Photoshop ACR

Go anywhere interesting these days, and chances are, there are people there. Lot’s of them. Try to take a photo and you are going to have to perform some tourist removal in post.

Camera Raw has an auto removal feature, that detects and removes people. Let’s have a look.

Enter ACR (Adobe Camera Raw). In this case, we are going Filter>Camera RAW filter.
(I recently made a tutorial that shows different ways to get into ACR, offering different features sets).

Photoshop Filter menu with Camera Raw Filter highlighted

We first have to enable the feature, because it’s a tech preview.

Click on the gear the top right of ACR.

Camera Raw preferences gear icon outlined in red

The preferences window opens.

Choose Technology previews. And turn them on. Restart Photoshop for this to take effect.

Camera Raw Technology Previews with New AI Features and Settings Panel checked

Open your image into ACR.

Notice we have a guy working. there are 2 people in the background, who might be considered distractions.

Factory worker with yellow ear protection at a machine, two coworkers behind him

Choose the eraser tool

Remove tool eraser icon in the Camera Raw toolbar

Make sure the Use Generative ai option is on.

Remove panel with Use Generative AI checked and Distraction Removal options

Under distraction Removal, you will see Reflections, that I have previously covered. Now we have people too.

Distraction Removal People section with overlay color and the Remove button

When you click on the people. the distractions will show in red. (you can change the overlay color)

Click Remove to remove the people.

Two background coworkers highlighted in red for removal behind the worker

Most of the time, it does a good job. Keep reading to see what to do when it doesn’t work as well.

Factory worker alone after the two coworkers were removed

Here is another example of myself at the Brooklyn Bridge.

The people are selected, and we hit remove.

Man on the Brooklyn Bridge with a passerby highlighted in red for removal

Oops, a weird object has appeared. How to fix it?

Odd white object left on the bridge walkway where the person was removed

Click show overlay. Now you can see the different pins

Show Overlay checked, revealing removal pins on the bridge photo

Click the pin that is attached to the object that didn’t work correctly.

Click Generate under people.

Pin selected on the leftover object with the Generate button to redo that area

Just the one pin is re-generated and everything looks good now.

Man standing alone on the Brooklyn Bridge walkway after the fix

Check out the video to see more details on this.

Thanks

Great to see you here at the CAFE

Colin


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3 comments

  1. Richard Grubola

    The video is not showing up for me but your written instructions are great. Thanks again Colin!

  2. The new Object Removal tool in ACR looks incredibly powerful—almost like having Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill built right in.

  3. Graham D'Aucourt

    I am finding more and more that I get much better results when removing/replacing people and others if I use ACR rather than Photoshop itself. Is this to be expected?

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