How to Effortlessly Remove People from Photos
Tutorial Details
- Program: Photoshop
- Difficulty: Intermediate
- CompletionTime: 1/2 hour
Final Product What You'll Be Creating
Annoyed by crowds of people getting in your images? Hate the thought of hours in front of the computer cloning them out? Wandering tourists and people can pose a real problem for photographers, but there’s an easy solution.
In this video tutorial, we show how to remove crowds of people automatically without hours of retouching. We’ll walk you through the process from start to finish!
Watch the Video
Overview of Video
Here’s a quick overview of what to expect throughout the video tutorial:
1. Shooting the Images on Location
We’ll start off by going on location, viewing the area to be photographed, and learning about the problems posed by wandering tourists and crowds.
2. Tips For Avoiding People
The tutorial then takes us into post-production, looking at how best to avoid crowds and people in the first place. By getting up at dawn, for instance.
3. Setting Up the Images and Running the Script
Here’s the main process of running the script within Photoshop:
- Shoot lots of images to ensure you have area of the background without an obstruction
- The first script is “Load Files into Stack”
- It then runs the “Median” filter that will calculate and remove the intrusive objects
- Nothing static is touched – only moving objects (so it’s only suitable for shooting a static scene)
- A few tips for cleaning up the image are then covered
The technique is also excellent for removing image noise. You need Photoshop CS3 Extended for this but if you don’t have that version, I’ll show you a free service that promises to do the same thing for you.
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By Simon Plant
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Well trained annoying person haha :D That was funny…
Nice tut. btw…
Wow, just wow! This was truly an amazing way to remove people from shots. Quite frankly I’ve always just removed obtrusive objects manually and mainly since I had no idea that something like this existed. I’m assuming that I’ll need a membership here in order to see the download however, so for the time being I guess I’ll just have to stick to doing it “the same ol’ way”. Thank you for sharing this.
Oh wow do I feel stupid. I just noticed that the script already is in Photoshop (at the least it is in cs4). My bad :)
This is going to be a lifesaver! Thank you so much for sharing this technique, I’m excited to go try it out.
VERY NICE!
Nice to see video tuts with written instructions too, I remember seeing a tut like this a while back. It was a little different but generally the same technique. Thanks though
nice stuff. i dont know how you could do this without a tripod, or some other way on to hold it totally steady, nor why you would WANT to.
Very cool. I saw a tutorial recently on this that used the same technique to reduce grain, which you mentioned, but thought it was worth reiterating.
Completely Brilliant. Thanks for posting that. I imagine if you open 20 tiffs in CS3 you might have to have some serious ram to do this. :)
Great stuff!
Any chance you can comment on the final processing you did to get the contrasty “cool” look?
your video on youtube????…….my country kidnap our Netizens ….i just can see it
great, thanks a lot for this! really usefull
great, in the past I used handguns and intimidation to remove people from the frame! Now I just need photoshop!
Thanks.
Very interesting thing it is
This looks like a really solid technique. I am actually trying to do the exact opposite. I am trying not to remove, but to /add/ people to my photo.
Basically I am taking a photo every 30 or so seconds, and wanting to stack all of the photos together to map flow of how people walk across a particular grassy field. The idea then being to pave the most used routs. Do you have any suggestions for how best to do this?