Last week I was editing a product lifestyle shot for a client. Great light, good composition, lovely subject. Also: a stray power line cutting through the background, a random plastic bag near the bottom left, and framing so tight the subject looked like they were about to headbutt the edge of the frame. Classic.

I’ve been in this situation more times than I’d like to admit. And while I have my go-to moves for cleanup, I’d been hearing a lot about the newer AI-assisted tools in Photoshop 2025 and honestly hadn’t given them a proper workout yet. So when I came across this Aaron Nace (PHLEARN) tutorial on cleaning up, reframing, and polishing photos using the latest Photoshop tools, I sat down with my coffee, opened a fresh tab, and paid attention.

The Remove Tool Is Not What You Think It Is

Most people have tried the Healing Brush or Content-Aware Fill for removing background junk. They work. Sometimes they’re a pain. The Remove Tool, which has been quietly improving across recent Photoshop updates, is a different animal.

In the tutorial, Aaron uses it to clear out background clutter including wires, which are notoriously annoying to remove because they’re thin, they cross over multiple tones and textures, and any mistake is immediately obvious. The Remove Tool handles this by letting you paint over the problem area with a brush, and Photoshop figures out the fill using a combination of contextual and generative AI approaches.

The key thing Aaron demonstrates here is how stroke direction matters. You’re not just slapping a blob of paint over the wire. You paint along the length of the wire, following its path. This gives Photoshop the context it needs to understand what should be there instead. If you fight the tool by painting perpendicular or in random blobs, you’ll get ugly results. Work with the geometry of the image.

He also recommends working on a duplicate layer before touching anything. Old advice, still vital. The Remove Tool is non-destructive only if you set it up that way.

Fixing Tight Framing with Generative Expand

This is the part of the tutorial that got me genuinely excited, because tight framing is one of those problems I used to solve by scaling the subject down (losing quality) or doing painstaking manual clone-stamping at the edges (losing time and sanity).

Generative Expand works by extending your canvas in whatever direction you need, then using Adobe’s Firefly-powered generation to fill in the new space. In the tutorial, Aaron selects the Crop Tool, pulls the canvas outward beyond the existing image boundary, and uses the Generative Expand option that appears in the contextual task bar. Photoshop generates fill content that matches the existing scene.

A few practical notes from watching this: the results vary depending on how complex your background is. A sky and some soft foliage? Nearly perfect on the first try. A crowd of people or a detailed architectural element running to the edge? You’ll probably cycle through a few variations using the generate button in the Properties panel. Photoshop gives you multiple options each time you run it, so treat it like a slot machine that occasionally pays out exactly what you need. Patience and a few extra clicks go a long way.

Adding a New Sky and Making It Look Real

Aaron takes things a step further by replacing the sky entirely using Photoshop’s Edit > Sky Replacement feature. This is something I’ve used before with mixed results, but watching his approach clarified where I was going wrong.

The tool does an automatic selection and blending job, but the real work happens after. He drops into Camera Raw for the final blend pass. Specifically, he uses Camera Raw as a Smart Filter on a merged composite layer (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E to stamp visible, then convert for smart filters). Inside Camera Raw, he uses local masking with the Sky mask preset to adjust luminance, temperature, and saturation for the sky independently from the foreground. This is the step that makes the replacement look like it was always there rather than looking like a sticker on a photo.

The takeaway here is that Sky Replacement is a starting point, not a finish line. Camera Raw is where it actually gets believable.

Where This Workflow Gets Tricky in Real Client Work

I want to be straight with you about one limitation I’ve run into when applying techniques like this. Generative Expand is genuinely impressive, but it creates pixel-based content generated by AI, which means technically it falls into a gray area for some commercial licensing contexts. A few clients I work with have asset policies that require clear provenance for every element in an image. Before you use Generative Expand on a commercial deliverable, it’s worth a quick conversation with your client about their content policy. This isn’t a knock on the tool, it’s just the current reality of working in a world where AI-generated content has legal and contractual nuance.

For personal work, editorial projects, or clients who aren’t sweating those details, go wild.

The Single Most Useful Thing in This Entire Tutorial

If I had to extract one idea from this whole workflow and hand it to you on a napkin, it would be this: Camera Raw at the end, applied as a Smart Filter to a merged composite layer, is one of the most powerful finishing moves available in Photoshop right now. It gives you global and local control over a complex edit without destructively touching any of your underlying layers.

That alone is worth the watch. Head over to the full Aaron Nace tutorial on the PHLEARN YouTube channel to see the whole thing in action, because watching the Remove Tool and Generative Expand work in real time makes the technique land in a way that reading about it simply cannot.