Taking passersby out of travel photos
Paint away one or two small figures in the distance.
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Guide
Erase Brush is the retouching panel of the image workbench (?tool=erase). Paint over whatever should disappear, click “Start erasing”, and the algorithm works inward from the border of the painted area, inferring colours layer by layer with the Telea fast marching method (FMM). The panel offers two modes — “Erase brush” for clutter, passersby and text, and “Remove acne and spots”, which caps the brush at 32px and keeps the surrounding skin texture, so a dab is enough. The number of strokes painted so far is shown live, and you can “Undo one stroke” or “Clear all” and paint again. The result goes onto the undo stack and supports “full-resolution replay” on export. Everything is computed locally in your browser.
Updated 2026-09-093 min read
Erase Brush is the retouching panel of the image workbench (?tool=erase). Paint over whatever should disappear, click “Start erasing”, and the algorithm works inward from the border of the painted area, inferring colours layer by layer with the Telea fast marching method (FMM). The panel offers two modes — “Erase brush” for clutter, passersby and text, and “Remove acne and spots”, which caps the brush at 32px and keeps the surrounding skin texture, so a dab is enough. The number of strokes painted so far is shown live, and you can “Undo one stroke” or “Clear all” and paint again. The result goes onto the undo stack and supports “full-resolution replay” on export. Everything is computed locally in your browser.
It suits small targets on fairly simple backgrounds; filling a large, complex area (crowds, dense texture) turns visibly mushy, and that is a property of the algorithm.
| Input | Output | Notes |
|---|---|---|
A small plastic bag in the bottom-right of a beach photo |
Painted over and filled with sand texture |
Even backgrounds work best |
A line of semi-transparent watermark text in the top-left of a screenshot |
The text is gone, the solid background shows no trace |
Your own content only |
Three spots dabbed in acne mode |
The spots vanish and the skin texture stays |
A brush of about 20px |
Paint away one or two small figures in the distance.
Erase a small price tag on a white-background product shot.
Paint over an avatar or nickname in a chat screenshot and let the fill cover it.
Dab a few blemishes on a portrait.
The algorithm infers colour inward from the border, so the bigger the target and the busier the background, the more easily it blurs. Erase in a few smaller passes, or remove only the most conspicuous part.
It is not the right tool. A tiled watermark covers a wide area and sits on top of fine detail, so erasing it piece by piece damages much of the picture — and watermarks on other people's work should not be removed in the first place.
Acne mode uses a small brush and preserves the surrounding texture while filling, which suits skin; the erase brush fills more smoothly, which suits objects.
The smudge-and-fill pass runs entirely inside your browser and no image is sent to a server; closing the page releases the memory it was using.
Updated 2026-09-09
Brush over clutter, passers-by or text watermarks; the background is filled in automatically
Everything runs locally in your browser; files are never uploaded to a server