Having a date and time stamp on a picture can be a great way to spur nostalgia. This was actually the corner stone for one of our previous Photoshop tutorials, in which we covered how to date stamp photos in such manner that it doesn’t cause any distraction from the picture itself.

Of course, having date/time stamps displayed on pictures is not for everyone’s taste, especially if you think about the ones that come automatically imprinted by our digital cameras. Many times they are flashy, obtrusive and misplaced. So in case you’ve left the date imprint option “On” in your camera settings, but don’t want to see those stamps on your digital images.

In case you don’t have in your possession the original images, the most elementary way to remove date stamp from photos is to crop it out. Although it is the simplest method one can resort to, it is at the same time the least effective. Cropping out the stamp can be rarely done without having a negative impact on the image and altering it. The main downsides of using this method are losing an important part of the photo and changing the composition for the worse. With Photoshop we have better options.

The Clone Stamp and Healing Brush tools

Since the Crop tool can prove itself useful on rare occasions, it’s best to turn our attention to other ones we can truly rely on, like the Clone Stamp and the Healing Brush. So if you want to remove a time stamp using a combination of these tools, here’s how to do it:

Step 1

Open the image in Photoshop and select the Clone Stamp tool from the left side toolbar. Before moving any further, right click on the picture and set the brush size and hardness to meet your requirements.

Step 2

With the cursor placed around the area of the date stamp, hold down the “Alt” key on your keyboard (it will turn into a target). Next start taking samples by clicking on the exact spot you wish to copy from.

Step 3

Now it’s time to cover the time stamp with the area you’ve sampled in the previous step. Just click and drag the cursor over the stamp until it’s gone.

Step 4

In order to get rid of any unwanted lines or marks and hence leave no traces behind, we are going to use the Healing Brush tool. So select it from the left side toolbar and then right click on the image to edit your brush size and hardness settings.

Step 5

Hold down your “Alt” key and click around the area of the original date stamp to take samples. Then, by using small clicks, just paint over that specific area until you’re content with the way image looks.

Use the Content Aware Fill option

In this date stamp removal tutorial, we’ll show you another way to get rid of unwanted objects/elements: by using Photoshop’s Content Aware Fill feature. Here are the steps you need to follow:

Step 1

Open your image in Photoshop. Then make a selection around the stamp using which selection tool you prefer, in this particular case we are going to use the Magic Wand. No matter the tool used, your final selection should look like the one above:

Step 2

Now let’s expand the date stamp area we previously selected so that it will include a decent amount of background pixels. In order to do this follow this path: Select > Modify > Expand. Enter the number of pixels you believe are necessary (we’re going to expand the selection by 3 pixels) and press OK.

Step 3

Go to Edit > Fill. Next choose Content Aware in the Contents section, and in the Blending section set the Mode to Normal and the Opacity to 100%. The Color Adaptation is by default unchecked, so leave it like that. Here’s how your dialog box should appear:

This is the way the stamp should look like once you’ve applied the Content Aware Fill feature:

Step 4

Now all you have to do is just deselect the selection around the time stamp by pressing Ctrl+D. Then you can see that it is no longer visible on your image.