Too Many People?

Posted on May 29, 2010 | 1 comment

You line up that perfect shot of that perfect landmark … only to discover the guy in the Bermuda shorts hiking through your image. Followed by the Boy Scout troop. And the hardy jogger. What’s a photographer to do?

Try this tip. Start taking photos of the scene with your camera on a tripod. Work as quickly as you can to avoid changes in light, cloud formations, etc. (This will work best in manual or aperture priority, as you want to maintain a constant depth of field). As people finally move from one part of the scene to another take another shot. Take as many shots as you need to get the entire scene with every portion of it clear of people. Next, import all the photos into Photoshop and go to run the script, Medians. This script looks for the common elements of your photos and combines them into one complete one. If the people are not common to each part of each photo you took, Medians will leave them out of the final, combined image. Voila!

You may need to do a little cleanup work with clone or heal, but if you work quickly on the scene you have an opportunity to get the shot you really wanted – sans tourists. The trick is using a steady tripod so all your images register (fit perfectly on top of one another) and getting each section of your photo free of any person. It may take a while, but it may get you the shot you set out to capture.