This post will introduce you to a little Photoshop trick I learned awhile ago, how to remove that outdated logo from your product photo.
Just over a year ago I decided to change the name of my company from the Design Den to Molten Glass Creations. After doing so I quickly realized that a lot of my photos had the old name on them and that I needed to change that name to the new one. The challenge here was how? I was afraid I was either going to have to retake all the photos again or spend countless hours editing each image to remove the old signature.
Thank goodness for tips & tricks in Photoshop. I have been a Photoshop user for many years but had never really spent any time in photo editing to this extent. After editing a dozen or so photos I found the "patch tool". This tool made it quick and easy to remove the old signature from my photos.
For those of you who don’t use Photoshop, there are other photo editing software, some online, some free, that will do something similar. For this post I will only be using Photoshop. I use Photoshop CC which is a cloud based software. It will cost you $15/month.
Step 1: Open your image in Photoshop.
We will remove the Design Den signature from the bottom of the image without changing the background colour or having to do a lot of fancy retouching.
Step 2: Using your Patch Tool. I’ve added a quick video to show the steps
Bring your image into Photoshop.
Next using your patch tool, draw a circle around the signature. Now still using your patch tool, drag the circled box to a clean area on your image. Here I’m pulling the circle to the left but you can move it to the top as well
The patch tool is intuitive and will try to match the colour as closely as possible.
Lastly, press command+D (on a Mac) or control+D (on Windows to deselect the patch tool.
You can now add your new logo or signature.
This feature is a very effective quick fix for removing signatures and logos where they sit on a solid coloured background. More work is required if you have multi-toned backgrounds. In some cases further editing may be needed. Here is an example of removing a signature from a multi-toned background.
Removing the signature from a multi-toned background
Depending on how detailed the area is where you’ll be removing the signature, you should be able to follow the above steps. Zoom in to your image so you can better select the margins. Also be sure that the “content-aware” option is selected.
Using your Patch Tool, draw a circle around one area of the same background and move to the nearest clean background area. Repeat this procedure for the other portion of the signature.
Last step is to clean up the background or spill-over. To do this you will need to select the background colour you want to match. Using the colour picker tool click on the background you want to end up with (I already have the background selected). Next, using the paint brush tool, paint over the area with the background colour and voila! you have a clean image to work with going forward.
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Happy editing!
