Content-aware fill II. in Photoshop CS5

The sky is better off without wires.

Load the photo in Photoshop

You cannot always escape the uncongenial wire net when taking photos of a city or even a landscape. The snaking wires are especially unwanted in the clear sky among houses or columns. Content-aware fill introduced in Photoshop CS5 offers a solution for that.

Now we are also serving you with a little trick, which makes it easier to delete straight wires.

Be aware of content

Select Spot Healing Brush Tool (J key) in Photoshop tools palette. Select a size 3-4x thicker than the diameter of the thickest wire and preferably a sharp-edged brush.

Check in the options row at the top that Content-Aware fill be selected.

Starting point

Click with it at one end of the wire you want to remove. This time we want to remove it only from the sky because it is the most conspicuous there.

Section by section

If the wire is completely straight, it’s a piece of cake to get rid of it. Keep the Shift key pressed and click with the same brush at the other end of the wire. You can draw a completely straight line using this method. The software fills the place of the wire with “intelligent” samples taken from its surroundings, which is the color of the sky if you are lucky.

If the wire has an arch or bends slightly, you can work with the same method but then section by section. Keep the Shift button pressed and then click on several places on the wire leaving short straight sections. Finally click on its end point, in our case at the meeting point of the wire and the building at the opposite side.

Leftovers

If you work section by section, there will be pieces of wire left over the sky. You can run over them with the spot brush above one by one. There will be no trace of them left.

Clear sky

Our sky is at last clear, at least it’s without wires. As the façade of the houses usually contains more details than the homogenous sky, the wire piece left here is not really striking. If it is disturbing, you can remove them using this method but in smaller steps.