How to Use Patch Tool in Photoshop (Remove Clutter & Fix Image Imperfections)

Do You Know How To Use Patch Tool In Photoshop?

Controlling the quality of the photos you use for your business graphics is the key to maintaining impressive standards in your visuals.

If you have pet hair on your shirt, want to remove a distracting product logo from a lifestyle photo, have imperfections or dust on your product shot…

…or simply want to remove an unwanted object from an image – Photoshop’s patch tool is your best friend.

And that’s exactly what we have for today’s tutorial.

In this post, we’re going to teach you how to use patch tool in Photoshop to remove and fix imperfections on your business graphics.

Let’s get started!

Basic Steps On Using Patch Tool In Photoshop For Simple Images

Step 1: Now that we have Photoshop open…

…we’re going to start with this image by dragging and dropping it into our Photoshop window.

As usual, for any image that you want to alter in Photoshop…

…ensure that the layer your image is on is unlocked by double-clicking on the layer and clicking OK.

So the tool we’re using today is fairly simple and easy to use…

…but it’s also very powerful in how it can remove unwanted blemishes from your images and digital marketing graphics.

So, for this image, let’s say we want to remove this ladder here.

The patch tool works by covering your selected object or area with another part of the same image. Think of it as the Photoshop equivalent of a skin graft.

Step 2: You can access the patch tool by clicking this button on the toolbar or pressing J on your keyboard. Make sure that it’s set to “source” here.

Then click and hold down your mouse and draw a selection around your object.

Now that your object or area is selected, drag it over to the area you want to cover it with.

It’s important that you pay attention to lines or patterns when doing this.

For this image, there’s a border between the floor and the wall that we want to keep straight so we’re going to drag to this area.

We want to make sure the sample area’s wall and floor are aligned correctly.

Step 3: Now you can release your mouse, press m on your keyboard, right-click and deselect.

And now the ladder is completely gone and covered with the area we sampled to cover it. 

Steps On How To Use Patch Tool In Photoshop For Complicated Images

Now let’s work on something more complicated, let’s cover the area of spilled coffee here.

Obviously, this image here is intentional…

…but, you can apply this to a shirt covered in pet hair or a product shot that has a little bit of dust in it that you want to remove before posting.

You can also do this for any other image that you might want to omit or remove specific details of before you use it in any of your marketing graphics.

Of course, you would want to post only quality business graphics.

Step 1: Let’s start with patching this big area here with the plastic cup.

We can follow the same steps we did on our first sample.

Again, make sure this white line is not broken when we drag it to the area of the image we want to cover it with.

Now there’s this dark area at the top of our patch so we’re not quite done yet.

We’re just going to keep dragging it to the lower area until the patch doesn’t look off.

Step 2: And now with the big area covered, let’s patch the smaller splashes of coffee surrounding it.

Press m on your keyboard and right-click your mouse to deselect.

Covering these will be easier since the splashes are small and we have so much area around it that we can sample to cover our patch.

So once again, we’re going to select the patch tool and do the same steps to cover them.

Step 3: Now there’s this area at the top of the image where the coffee splashes are over the line…

…so we can just go ahead and patch it to follow the area under it that is now clean.

We’re going to do that a few times again and there we go. We’ve cleaned the spilled coffee out of this image!

Destination Function

Now the patch tool has another function, as you can see here, aside from the source, there’s a “destination” setting.

Let’s go ahead and click that. This works in reverse to how the source function works.

After you draw your selection around your object…

…it will now copy your selection and apply it to the area you drag it to.

Aside from cleaning up images, this is especially useful to get quality product shots because it’ll allow you to create cool image compositions.

And those are the steps on how to use patch tool in Photoshop!

If you want to see these steps in action, then watch the video at the top of this post.

We also have another tutorial on how to change the color of an object in Photoshop if you’re interested in learning that.

Now if you’re looking for expert designers to create your business graphics and images, get our graphic design services today.

Contact us to get started!

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