How to Remove People From Photos on Your Mac (2026): 4 Easy Ways

The quickest way to remove a person from a photo on a Mac is Clean Up in the Photos app: open the photo, click Edit, then Tools > Clean Up, and brush or circle the person. It works on Apple silicon Macs that run Apple Intelligence. On other Macs, Pixelmator Pro's Repair tool or TouchRetouch does the same job, and Preview can crop someone out for free.

It's always the shot you care about. The team photo where a stranger wandered across the back, the launch-day picture with a delivery driver mid-stride behind the banner. This guide covers each method step by step, which one to reach for, how to rescue a smeared fill, and the cases where erasing someone is the wrong call.

Which tool should you use?

Use Clean Up in Photos if your Mac supports Apple Intelligence; it's free and already installed. Pick an app only when Clean Up isn't available, or when you need layers and finer control.

How to remove people from photos with Clean Up in Photos

Clean Up in the Photos app removes a person you brush, click or circle and fills the space with background it generates. These are the steps from Apple's Photos guide for macOS 27:

1. Open Photos and double-click the photo.
2. Click Edit in the toolbar. (You can also select the thumbnail and press Return.)
3. Click Tools in the toolbar, then click Clean Up.
4. Look for highlighted items. Photos may highlight people or objects it thinks you'll want gone; click one to remove it.
5. For anyone not highlighted, click the brush icon below Erase in the Clean Up tools and drag the Size slider to fit.
6. Click, brush or circle the person. Zoom with the Zoom slider or by pinching on the trackpad for small figures.
7. Click Done.

One behavior surprises people: if your brush crosses a face, Photos may blur that face with a pixelated effect instead of erasing it, Apple notes. Circle the whole person in one loop rather than painting across their face, and give it a second pass if a blurred patch is left over.

When I fixed a team photo from an offsite, a stranger was half-hidden behind the back row. Circling the whole figure in one loop worked far better than dabbing at it piece by piece, because Photos had a clear outline of what to replace.

What Clean Up needs

Apple lists an M1 chip or newer and macOS Sequoia 15.1 or later as the minimum for Clean Up on a Mac, in Apple's requirements page. It doesn't currently work on devices bought in mainland China. Apple Intelligence also has to be on, with Siri and device language set to a supported language.

On macOS 27, Apple says its intelligent photo editing tools rely on server-side models and are subject to daily usage limits that vary with demand and how complex the request is. If Clean Up stops responding after a long editing session, that may be why. Try again later.

How to undo a Clean Up edit

Photos keeps the original, so a bad Clean Up is never permanent. From Apple's editing basics:

• Press Command-Z to undo the last stroke.
• Press and hold the M key to compare with the original, and let go to see your edit again.
• Choose Image > Revert to Original to throw away every change.
• Press Command-D to duplicate a photo before editing, if you want both versions side by side.

If you use iCloud Photos, your edit updates on your other devices too, so the cleaned-up version is the one you'll see on your iPhone. That's why I duplicate first whenever the photo also goes into a shared album.

How to remove a person in Pixelmator Pro

Pixelmator Pro's Repair tool removes a person you paint over and fills the area with color, texture and lighting from around it. Apple now owns it and documents it alongside its own apps. The steps below come from Pixelmator's own guide and Apple's Pixelmator Pro guide:

1. Open the photo in Pixelmator Pro.
2. Choose the Repair tool: click it in the Tools sidebar, choose Tools > Retouch > Repair, or press R.
3. Set the Brush Size slider a little bigger than the parts you're painting.
4. Paint over the person. The fill appears when you let go.
5. For a tighter result, select the person first with any selection tool, then click Repair Selection in the tool options.
6. Click Show Original to compare, or Reset to start over.

For an edit you can switch off later, add an empty layer above the photo, turn on Sample All Layers, and paint on the empty layer. The original pixels stay untouched underneath.

Pixelmator Pro costs $49.99 as a one-time Mac App Store purchase, or comes in Apple Creator Studio for $129 a year (or $12.99 monthly), per Apple's announcement. The subscription version needs macOS 26 or later. If removing people is all you need, the one-time purchase is the better deal; the subscription only makes sense if you'd also use Final Cut Pro or Logic Pro.

How to remove a person with TouchRetouch

TouchRetouch is a small Mac app built only for removing things from photos: people, power lines, spots. It costs $14.99 on the App Store and runs on macOS 10.14 or later, which makes it the easy pick for an Intel Mac that can't run Clean Up.

1. Open the photo in TouchRetouch, or Control-click it in Photos and choose Edit With > TouchRetouch (see Apple's guide to Edit With).
2. Choose object removal and paint over the person.
3. Apply the removal and check the fill.
4. Where the background has a pattern, like brick or tiles, use the Clone Stamp to copy a clean patch over what's left.

TouchRetouch's line removal is the hidden strength. A single drag clears a wire or a pole, per its listing, which is exactly the sort of thing that still clutters a street photo after the people are gone.

Luminar Neo: for people who already edit in it

Luminar Neo by Skylum has an Erase tool: you brush a red mask over the person and Luminar fills the area with texture matched to the lighting and shading around it. Skylum suggests keeping the masked area small for more precise results. Luminar is a full photo editor sold on plans, so it's worth it if you already use it for other edits; buying it just to erase one person is overkill when Photos or TouchRetouch will do.

How to crop someone out of a photo in Preview

Preview can't erase a person, but it can crop one out when they're near the edge of the frame. It's free and keeps every pixel real. From Apple's Preview guide:

1. Open the photo in Preview.
2. Click Show Markup Toolbar if it's hidden, then click Rectangular Selection.
3. Drag a rectangle around the part you want to keep.
4. Click Crop in the Markup toolbar.
5. Changed your mind? Choose Edit > Undo Crop straight away.

When I needed a clean headshot for a speaker bio and the only good shot had a colleague's shoulder in it, a tight crop in Preview was faster than any eraser and looked more natural.

Why the fill looks blurry after removing someone

A smeared or repeating fill usually means the tool didn't have enough clean background to copy. These fixes work in any of the apps above:

• Remove in pieces. Take out a large person in two or three passes instead of one giant stroke.
• Cover the shadow too. A person's shadow and reflection stay behind if you skip them, and they give the edit away.
• Zoom in for edges. Hair, fingers and bags leave halos; a smaller brush at a higher zoom clears them.
• Crop first. If the person is near the edge, crop them half out, then erase what's left. Less to invent means a cleaner result.
• Accept the limit. A person standing in front of the main subject, or covering a sign with words on it, rarely erases cleanly. Pick another shot if you have one.

When you shouldn't remove someone

Removing a passer-by from a holiday photo is harmless. Removing a person from a photo that records what happened is a different thing. Before a launch photo went into a press kit, I asked myself one question: would anyone who was there feel misled by this version? A stranger in the background, no. A teammate who was on stage, yes.

• Leave news, event and evidence photos alone. Clean Up is for distractions, not for changing the record.
• Ask before erasing a colleague from a team photo you post publicly; being cut out of the group shot stings.
• Keep the original. Photos keeps it automatically; in other apps, work on a copy or a separate layer.

Related guides

For what else Apple Intelligence does on your Mac, see what Apple Intelligence is and how to use it. If photos are your job rather than an occasional fix, AI for photographers covers culling, galleries and model releases.