Projects move quickly in the Station Casinos marketing department, sometimes we only get a day or two between design and publishing. So designers need to be able to understand a lot of information and context as fast as possible in order to make deadlines and reduce the number of potential revisions. So, when this rush photoshop job made its way across my art directors desk he certainly stopped to consider how much time we should give it before passing it along to me. 

The job was to edit a batch of photos with screens in it, pretty straight forward, just make all the screens match. But, in the middle of these softball edit requests was a sneaky complicated request. We needed to remove the lights from the palm trees in an outside pool photo. 

My art director sent me this job with the preface that the more complicated request could be omitted if I’m too busy. I ended up having some extra time though, and I saw it as a great opportunity to test out some of Photoshops new tools. In total, this job ended up taking me a little over an hour to complete, time I consider well spent. 

The new remove tool

I tried the gen fill tool on this first, seeing if I could make it fast and easy. Unfortunately, the results didn’t feel natural in this context, all the options were awkward and didn’t feel like they fit in the scene. So, instead, I decided to test out the “remove” tool. 

Using the polygon select tool, I surrounded the string light sections on the closest palm tree, then tapped on the “remove” tool on the sticky tool bar. After some thinking, bam, a new layer was created and all the string lights were replaced with realistic palm tree bark! I then went through and meticulously replaced the lights on each tree, cleaned up any parts that felt unnatural, and doubled back to cover any reflections that showed the lights on the water and windows. 

This “remove” tool is a great new addition to the photoshop toolbox, it’s like a much more sophisticated “content aware” fill and I’m loving it.