Removing Extra Fingers and Strange Artifacts From AI Art

Generated images look fine until you zoom in. Then the jewellery stops halfway, a chair has three legs, and a pattern in the background does not line up with itself. Finding these reliably matters more than the fixing, because what you never notice is what someone else will.

Find Them First

Random scanning misses things. Use a fixed pattern instead and you will find them all in about two minutes.

1. Press 1 to zoom to 100 percent.
2. Start at the top left corner.
3. Pan left to right, then down one screen, then right to left. Like reading.
4. Look at every edge where two things meet. That is where artefacts concentrate.
5. Write down what you find before fixing anything, so you do not lose track.

The Artefact Checklist

Work through this list. It covers the great majority of what generators produce.

The Three Tools That Fix Nearly Everything

The pattern is always the same: select, feather, then paint. The selection is what keeps the repair contained, and the feather is what stops the join being visible.

The standard repair

1. Duplicate the layer, Shift+Ctrl+D, and name it "repairs".
2. Zoom to 200 percent.
3. Free Select loosely around the artefact plus a little clean area.
4. Select, Feather by 3 pixels.
5. Clone from a nearby clean patch. Soft brush, about 60 percent opacity.
6. Heal over the join to match the texture.
7. Select, None, then zoom out and check it at real size.

The clone tool guide covers the tool properly, and feathering a selection covers why the feather step matters so much.

Artefact by Artefact

Something that half exists

A necklace that stops, a strap that fades out, a glasses arm going nowhere. Two options: remove it entirely, or complete it.

Removing is easier. Select the partial object, feather, and clone the surrounding area over it. Completing means cloning the existing part of the object and rotating the copy into position, which works for a chain or a strap but rarely for anything structural.

Duplicated objects

Common at wide aspect ratios, where the model repeats a subject to fill the frame. This is usually not worth fixing. Crop one of them out, or regenerate at a squarer ratio, as the image sizes guide explains.

Patterns that do not line up

Tiles, bricks and fabric prints that jump across a seam. Select a clean section of the pattern, copy it, paste as a new layer, and move it over the broken part. Then use a layer mask with a soft brush to blend the join. Matching the pattern beats trying to repaint it.

Objects that merge into each other

Where a chair melts into a table. Clone background over the merged area to separate them, then darken the gap between with a small soft brush at low opacity. As with fused fingers, the shadow in the gap is what sells the separation.

Shadows pointing the wrong way

Select the wrong shadow, feather generously, and clone the floor or wall over it. Then paint a new shadow on a separate layer set to Multiply at low opacity, going in the right direction. Multiply darkens without flattening the texture underneath.

When to Stop

Zoom out to the size the image will actually be seen at. Every few minutes, not just at the end.

An artefact only visible at 400 percent zoom, in an image destined for a 600 pixel wide blog post, is not worth another twenty minutes. The people looking at it will never see what you are looking at.

Preventing Them Next Time

• Add extra fingers, deformed hands, extra limbs, duplicate objects to the negative prompt.
• Give hands something to hold. A defined grip produces far fewer errors than free hands.
• Prefer squarer ratios. Extreme widths cause duplication.
• Ask for simpler backgrounds. Fewer objects means fewer places for things to merge.
• Generate several and pick the cleanest, rather than fixing the first one.

The prompt writing guide covers the negative prompt side in more depth.

Common Questions

What counts as an artefact?

Anything the model produced that would not exist in a real version of the scene. Duplicated objects, jewellery that goes nowhere, patterns that do not line up, objects that merge into each other, and limbs that do not connect.

Is it faster to regenerate?

For structural errors, usually yes. For small stray marks, cloning takes seconds and regenerating risks losing everything else that was working.

What is the single most common artefact?

Things that half exist at the edges of the subject. A necklace chain that stops, a glasses arm that fades out, a strap that goes behind a shoulder and never comes out.

Do artefacts get worse when I upscale?

Yes, which is why repair comes before enlargement. A small artefact enlarged four times becomes an obvious one.