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Remove power lines and wires from a photo
The sunset was perfect and there were four cables across it. Brush along each one and the sky closes over it — no cloning, no patching, no Photoshop.
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Try with an example
Also called power line remover, wire remover, cable remover, telephone wire remover or overhead line eraser. It is one tool either way — the editor at the top of this page.
Why wires are the hardest easy job
A wire is a tiny amount of pixels arranged in the most awkward possible way: a few pixels thick, running the entire width of the frame, and crossing every kind of background on the way. Removing one is trivial where it sits against clear sky and gets much harder where it passes in front of a treeline, a roof edge or a building. That is why a wire that looks half-removed almost always failed at those crossings rather than along the easy stretch.
The technique: thin brush, short passes
Shrink the brush until it is only slightly wider than the wire, zoom in, and work along it in short overlapping passes rather than one long stroke. A thin brush gives the model far less to invent, and short passes mean a section that comes out wrong is a small fix instead of a restart. Where the wire crosses something detailed, stop the pass at the crossing, handle the crossing on its own, and carry on.
Poles, pylons, insulators and the bits people forget
Wires arrive from somewhere. If you remove the cables and leave the pole they hang from, the photo looks stranger than before — a pole holding nothing reads as an error in a way four tidy cables never did. Remove the whole assembly: pole, cross-arms, insulators, the guy wire anchoring it, and the stub of cable disappearing off the frame edge. The same goes for a pylon on a ridge line, where the give-away is usually the shadow it throws down the slope.
Sky, trees and rooflines behave differently
Against a gradient sky the fill is close to free, because there is nothing to line up. Against foliage it is also forgiving, because trees have no structure a viewer can check. The difficult background is anything with a straight edge — a roofline, a gutter, a window frame, a horizon over water — because the eye follows that line and notices a kink of two pixels. Where a wire crosses one, brush a little past the edge on both sides so the model rebuilds a continuous line rather than meeting your stroke halfway.
One pass at a time, in order
Work the wires from the top of the frame down, and do the thinnest last. Thick cables are the ones a viewer sees first, so clearing them changes the photo most; and each removal you complete gives the next one more clean background to draw from. Undo between passes rather than at the end, so a pass that goes wrong never costs you the ones that went right.
Thin-brush control
Zoom in and shrink the brush onto a two-pixel cable without touching the roof behind it.
Rebuilds gradients cleanly
A wire against a graded sky leaves no seam and no smudge along the line it ran.
Pass by pass
Each wire is its own undo point, so a pass that goes wrong costs you one wire, not the photo.
Full resolution
Detail work is pointless if the export is downscaled. It is not.
What people use it on
If the thing you want gone is on this list, it works. If it isn’t, it probably still does — these are the ones people ask about.
Overhead lines
- Power lines across a sunset
- Telephone wires over a street
- Tram and trolleybus catenary
- Washing lines
- Festoon lighting cable
The hardware holding them
- Utility poles
- Pylons and transmission towers
- Cross-arms and insulators
- Guy wires
- Junction boxes on a wall
Roof and wall clutter
- TV aerials and satellite dishes
- Cable runs down a façade
- Downpipes
- Air-conditioning units
- Alarm boxes
Where it matters most
- Property listing photos
- Landscape and sunset shots
- Architectural photography
- Street photography
- Wedding shots with a pole in frame
Retouch images in seconds with incredible quality
Drag & drop an image above to get started for free
Frequently asked questions
How do I remove power lines from a photo for free?
Open cleanup.photo, drop the photo in, zoom in on a wire, shrink the brush to just wider than the cable and brush along it in short passes. The sky, roof or treeline behind it is rebuilt as you go. Download the full-resolution PNG when the frame is clear — no account and no cost.
What brush size should I use for thin wires?
Slightly wider than the wire itself, and no wider. A brush that covers a lot of surrounding sky asks the model to invent a large region for no reason; a brush barely wider than the cable gives it almost nothing to guess. Zoom in first — the brush is easier to size accurately at 200% than at fit-to-screen.
Can it remove the pole as well as the cables?
Yes, and it usually should. A pole left holding no wires looks more wrong than the wires did. Brush the pole, its cross-arms, any guy wire, and the shadow it casts, in the same pass or in a second one.
Why is there still a faint line where the wire was?
Almost always because the stroke was slightly too narrow and left the wire’s soft edge behind. Cables are usually a pixel or two wider than they look because of lens softness and compression. Brush the same path again a touch wider and the residue clears.
Does it work where a wire crosses a roof or a tree?
Yes, but those crossings are the hard part and deserve their own pass. Stop your stroke short of the crossing, do the crossing on its own with a small brush, and brush a little past the straight edge on both sides so the roofline is rebuilt continuously rather than meeting your stroke halfway.
Can I remove wires from a photo on my phone?
Yes. The editor runs in a mobile browser with no app to install. Pinch to zoom right in on the cable before you brush — wire removal is the one job where the zoom matters more than anything else.
Keep going
Try it on a photo you gave up on
The one with the bin in the corner, or the stranger in the background. It takes about ten seconds and costs nothing.
Cleanup is built by DEA Innovations.
