How to remove an object from a photo

Removing something from a photo is really covering it: you replace the pixels of the unwanted object with pixels that match what should be behind it. There is no magic 'delete' — the editor has to borrow believable texture from elsewhere in the same photo.

The EditItAll photo editor does this with two brushes. The clone brush copies from a point you pick and paints it wherever you drag; the retouch brush blends a small blemish into its surroundings. Both let you paint the object out using the photo's own detail.

In the photo editor:

• Open the editor and load your image (PNG, JPG or WebP).
• Zoom in on the object so you can work precisely.
• Select the clone brush, set a sample point on a clean patch of nearby background, then paint over the object so the sampled texture covers it.
• Re-sample often from different clean areas so the patch does not look repeated.
• For small spots and blemishes, switch to the retouch brush, which blends automatically.
• Export as PNG or JPG when the area looks natural.

It all runs on your device — go offline after the page loads and it still works, so your photo is never uploaded.

Cloning works beautifully when the background is simple and uniform: a speck on a clear sky, a stray object on grass or sand, a blemish on a plain wall. There is plenty of matching texture to borrow, so the patch disappears.

It gets hard when the background is busy or structured — a face, straight architectural lines, or a detailed crowd — because cloned pixels have to line up perfectly to look real. Be honest about this: there is no content-aware fill or generative AI here that invents new background, so a complex removal takes patience and careful sampling, and sometimes a clean result simply is not possible.

Because cloning permanently changes pixels, do the removal on a duplicate layer rather than the original — that way you can erase part of your work or start over without reloading the photo. See using layers in a photo editor. Keep your untouched original too, since exporting flattens everything into one image. If your real goal is to hide a face or a plate rather than erase an object, blurring part of a photo is usually the better tool.