Delete Someone From a Group Photo Without Ever Opening Photoshop

Remove a person from the middle of a group photo, close the gap as if they were never there, and do it all without touching Photoshop. That option is now sitting inside Lightroom for anyone who has never gotten comfortable with layers and masks.

Glyn Dewis walks through the exact workflow using a shot from his I Am Lyme project, a picture he grabbed with the Scallop Diver Dorset crew at the end of a shoot. He starts by testing the built-in remove tool in Lightroom with generative AI checked, and the result is honest: the background rebuilds fairly well, but the arm and hand of the man beside him fall apart. Dewis is upfront that this video is for people who use Lightroom and stop there, not for anyone already living in Photoshop every day. His own wife is the example he reaches for, someone with phone pictures she'd love to tidy up but no interest in learning masks to do it.

The real method routes the image out to Adobe Firefly through the Photo menu, using the "Generating Firefly" option and then "Edit Photo." That sends the picture to the Firefly website, where Dewis picks his model from a list that includes Adobe's own Firefly Image 5 alongside partner models like ChatGPT's image model and Google Gemini 3.1. His prompt spells everything out: remove the person in the blue baseball cap, move the remaining three people close together, and keep the faces, hair, clothing, and coloring identical to the original. About a minute and a half later, the three men are standing together, the background is intact, and there's no sign anyone was cut out. He then shows how to check the resolution and upscale, since the regenerated image comes back smaller than the 6,060 by 4,040 original.

Credit cost is where the tradeoffs get concrete. Switching to the ChatGPT image model at high quality jumps the cost from 20 credits to 80, a real leap that Dewis flags plainly. His framing is sensible: this is an occasional job, not a daily habit, so a single 80-credit edit won't drain your balance. He also points out the one rough edge in the round trip, that Firefly hands the finished file to your downloads folder rather than dropping it straight back into the Lightroom catalog, and he'd like Adobe to close that loop.

This fits into a wider shift in how Adobe is spreading generative editing across its apps instead of locking it behind Photoshop. Firefly now sits at the center of that push, and the model picker inside it, offering ChatGPT and Gemini alongside Adobe's own engine, points to a future where you choose the right tool for a specific edit rather than committing to one. The practical takeaway extends past removing people: a prompt that names exactly what to keep, faces, hair, clothing, coloring, gives generative models far less room to invent things you don't want. That discipline carries over to any AI edit you attempt, whether you're clearing a background, removing a distraction, or reworking a crowded holiday frame. Match the resolution question to your output too, since a regenerated file often lands smaller than your camera's native file and benefits from an upscale before you print or crop.

Dewis is careful not to oversell it. He says outright that Firefly isn't better than Photoshop, and if you're comfortable there, keep going. The point is that skipping Photoshop no longer puts this kind of edit out of reach, and the work doesn't have to be professional to be worth doing. A family photo with someone you'd rather not see, a holiday shot with a stranger drifting through the back, or a snap you simply want to like a bit more all qualify.

Watch the full walkthrough above to see the prompt, the model choice, and the before-and-after that sells the whole approach.