Utility Lines

Sometimes, it is absolutely insane how many "utility lines" appear in photos I've taken over the years. Even out in the country, it's often difficult to snap a photo of a barn in a field beside the road without catching a couple of power lines somewhere in the shot.

I thought the Queen Anne-inspired house in the following photo was lovely and wanted a picture of it. Many, many years ago, I lived just a couple blocks from that house and passed it almost every day on my to work, church, shopping, or some other destination. While revisiting the area a few years ago, I decided to stop my car long enough to get a quick snap of it. When I took the photo, I noticed there were some utility lines in the shot, but thought I would edit them out, using my trusty PaintShopPro™ software, as I have done countless times in the past.

"Countless times," you may ask...? Yes, no exaggeration. I have spent hours upon hours, editing hundreds of photos, carefully using tools such as the Clone Brush and Push Brush, tediously removing the lines. Then one must re-blend the affected areas with the Smudge Brush and Clone Brush to smooth the tones of the blue sky, the trees, and anything else that the power lines crossed.

Closer inspection of the photograph on my computer screen revealed a veritable nightmare of editing that lay in front of me. Not only are there clearly visible lines and cables in the shot, but zooming into different areas show wispy traces of lines here-and-there. To help demonstrate what I'm talking about, look at the following, where I have traced the lines — and I know there are others that I failed to trace, but my eyes were quite bleary by this point! LOL! It would take hours of work to clean up this mess in a halfway acceptable manner.

For those that might be confused by the plethora of wires and cables, I can explain. Some of the wires and cables shown in the photo provide electrical service to the area, while others carry telephone signals for landline phones or cable-TV signals (each provider has their own cables). There are likely cables for other purposes up there of which I am unaware, such as security systems, traffic-light control, and so forth. The steel cables that are seen slicing diagonally through the image are "guy wires" that are used to secure the big utility poles to help keep them from toppling in high winds, or if a vehicle loses control and strikes one.

My laptop came pre-loaded with an AI app (Copilot™), but I'd never used it until recently when I asked it to help enhance/restore some old family photos. It did a great job restoring and enhancing the old, faded photos! I honestly do not know what made me think of this next idea, but one day I decided to see if it could assist in removing utility lines and poles. OMG, it did it, beautifully in just a couple of minutes! The result is shown below!

One thing that truly amazed me: If you scroll back up to the first photo in the post and look closely, you will notice that the brown utility pole was casting a shadow on the house (to the immediate right of the first upstairs window). When the AI removed the pole, it also removed the shadow of that pole on the house, without my having to ask it to do so! 😯

So below is the final edit by me in PaintShopPro™ where I removed the hood of my car from the bottom of the photo as well as the shadow of another utility pole across the pavement. I probably could have asked the AI to do that, too, but I've learned (the hard way) that running a photo thru the AI too many times often introduces other errors, even when "change nothing else" is specified in the prompt. 😒

All I used for a prompt was "remove utility poles and utility lines from the attached photo, perserve details of the house."

Please don't misunderstand: I do not intend for this to be a turning point where my future images will be heavily touched by AI. I will still be editing photos and applying filters manually with PaintShopPro™ and other tools, but will definitely use AI's assistance here-and-there as each case warrants.

Also: ➡️ I will not use AI for writing — not even proofreading or translating! ⬅️

I hope my sharing this tip will help others edit their photos faster and easier! If you have any similar tips, please share them in the comments!