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Using Generative Fill to Replace Subjects    

4 March 2026

We liked this night view of the church up the street, filtered through our unwashed front window, so we lined up the shot a few days ago. We knew it would be photobombed by the Mt. Sutro communication tower but we thought we could deal with that in post production.

A Light in the Dark. The final image.

And we did, using the traditional digital retouching tools like the Healing Brush and Rubber Stamp. While that worked well enough, we thought we could improve out technique. Faster and a bit less work, in short.

You can, it turns out, use Photoshop's Firefly-powered Generative Fill to "remove" objects. You're actually replacing them but it looks like you're removing them.

We knew about this but the how eluded us until we watch a 4-minute video by Jan Kabili from Adobe's Learning team.

HOW TO

Here are the steps we took to remove Mt. Sutro Tower (and a street sign) from our image:

1. Select the objects you want to remove

There's a trick to this. Use the Object Selection tool, set it in the tool bar to run in the Cloud to include finer details. Then Select Subject.

You'll want to do two things more to target objects for removal.

First, use any selection tool to deselect the subjects you don't want to remove. In our case, the entire church was selected, so we Lassoed around it with the Option key down to remove the selection.

Second, you want to expand the selection. We did that from the Select menu's Modify command (as we always have) but you can use the Contextual Command Bar, as Kabili recommends. We couldn't find it in the Window menu but right clicking off the image gave us the option.

She used a value of 10 pixels but we tried just 3 at first. That left traces of the tower in the sky, so we bumped the expansion value to 10 and that did the trick.

2. Select Generative Fill

With objects selected in your image, the Generative Fill command under the Edit menu will be active. When you select it, you'll be prompted for a text description of what you want. But when removing objects, you should leave it blank. Then click the Generate button.

That will replace your selection with new content generated by Firefly.

SelectExpandGenerate

The Properties panel will display three options to choose from if you don't like what is displayed.

Bonus: Undo

If you don't like an effect or make a mistake, you can easily step back with a Control-Z Undo. That's what we did when we found our 3-pixel expansion wasn't sufficient.

FOR WHAT

Removing discreet objects is an obvious use of this technique, particularly when it comes to communications towers photobombing your pastoral scene.

But it's also helpful in product shots where the seamless didn't quite make it to the edge of the frame. Or in removing reflections, including the image of the guy taking the photograph.

And it is, as we hoped, fast and less work than the way we've been doing it.

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