Select and delete objects instantly

The Photoshop 2023 desktop (version 24.0.0) has doubled down on selection improvements. These include the powerful One-Click Delete and Fill, and Delete and Fill with the Lasso Tool. Let’s take a real-world look at what they can do.

One-Click Delete and Fill

This feature does pretty much what you think it does. Using the Objection Selection Tool, you can make your selection quite often by simply hovering over the object you wish to select. This will color it red. This is similar in appearance to Lightroom’s masking selections.

From there, you simply hit the Shift + Delete key. This instantly removes the selection. Photoshop fills in the background.

Making a giant truck that takes up half the image is obviously ridiculous. There’s just not very much information to form a realistic background. But you know how it is. It’s always fun to push these things to see what they do.

The more homogeneous the background, the better it seems to work. But it works surprisingly well in many complex backgrounds as well, as we’ll see in our next example.

This new Delete and Fill Selection function also works with the Lasso Tool.

Simply draw a selection around the area in which you wish to have disappear. Then right-click with your mouse. This produces a menu with quite a few selections. Choose “Delete and Fill Selection”. Poof. Gone.

Of course, can also use the Object Selection Tool instead of the Lasso Tool if you wish. It’s still a selection, after all. Either way, you right-click on the selection to produce the menu.

Delete and Fill vs. Content Aware Fill

So far, Delete and Fill has worked better than Content Aware Fill some of the time. And other times, Content Aware Fill has worked better. Certainly, Delete and Fill is faster than using Content Aware Fill workspace and refining the selection. 

It’s good to have choices along with the Healing Brush and Clone Tool. There are times when we want to get rid of sensor spots, errant lights, or unwanted leaves or branches hanging in the frame of an otherwise good image. All these tools can help.

Regardless, being able to make complex selections and delete them so easily is a huge time-saver. While we always want to get things right in an image to begin with, we don’t always have that luxury. Fortunately, Adobe has created some powerful selection and deletion tools in Photoshop to help us out.