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I am working with a flat image that has a light gray diagonal line intersecting the background in multiple areas. I would like to remove this line, as it used to belong to a label that is now cropped from the fame.

diagonal line to be edited out

Due to the line being diagonal, and the perspective, I'm finding it unusually challenging to reconstruct the background behind the line.

Here is the result of my most successful attempt so far:

enter image description here

The line is less noticeable here, but still visible. This was done by selecting and duplicating diagonal regions above and below the line, and moving/stretching them over it with the Transform Tool.

Other tools I have tried include: Content-Aware Fill, Clone Stamp, Liquify (Pinch), Motion Blur, and Transform (stretching to match the perspective).

I'm just curious if there is a better approach to tackling this kind of problem. Thanks.

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To be clear....

  • If you own these images, I don't know why there would be a diagonal line pattern on them.

  • If you've purchased these images, such a pattern would not be present on legitimate purchases.

  • The only time I can conceive of images having such a pattern is in order to prevent copyright infringement

Perhaps I'm incorrect, so I'll provide an answer. However, be aware this site is populated by individuals who make a living via intellectual property rights (digital images). So, asking to circumvent some things can be seen as unsavory.

I find for, the most part, nothing beats manual brush work combined with other tools when retouching photos.

Most of the more automated (Healing, Cloning, Content-aware) stuff will get you so far, then using a brush and manually painting almost always yields better results for me.

In many photos the actual, 100%, real-life, appearance of objects in particular may not be absolutely necessary. The goal is a believable photo which doesn't appear to have any marked flaws.

This is rather quick and dirty (and using the small, low resolution image posted here) but I'd start with the clone stamp tool and do as much as was feasible.

enter image description here

Once I have things sort of "roughed in" via cloning, I'd switch to a brush and paint on a new layer...

enter image description here

I could probably then go in with a Healing brush to try and mimic some textures a bit more. But given the quality of the image I had, there's not a great deal to improve once a certain point is reached.

There are also a clear pattern on the right side of the original image you posted from either cloning or healing that I can't overcome not seeing the entire image.

enter image description here

Other tools, such as content aware and copy/pasting sections make sense for larger areas of similar color or texture. However this image has very few "broad" filled areas and I find for such images manually painting* works best.

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  • Thank you Scott. To address your concern, I don't own the image, but it is publicly available to download by anyone (hence the low res). The lines are from labels, as I mentioned in my original post. After cropping to a different ratio, some words were gone and those lines pointing to the items no longer made sense. But this post is about a technique for dealing with such a case, not any particular image.
    – Mentalist
    Oct 21, 2019 at 3:14
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    Ahh okay. Fair enough, @Mentalist Given your rep.... I kind of figured there was a legitimate reason, which is why I answered. But it never hurts to express that circumventing copyright protection isn't really something that many GD.SE members will support. :)
    – Scott
    Oct 21, 2019 at 3:17

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