Wednesday, November 9, 2011

How to take pictures with no People in Crowded places


Ever been somewhere and wanted to get a picture of the scene without people but found it impossible?  I know I have.  This is something I read on the net that makes it extremely easy that most people don't know about.  Photoshop has a great tool using Median Statistics that makes this take only a couple of minutes.

You will need to take several pictures keeping track of where people are to ensure you get pictures of every location in the photo without people in the way and I suspect the more pictures you get of each Pixel without people the better it will work but I haven’t used it much yet.

The ideal way is using a tripod so there is no movement in the frame.  In the this example I did not have a tripod with me but people were walking through the scene fairly quickly.    I held the camera as still as possible with IS on and took 10 pictures as people walked around. 


Example of a before picture with several people in background


After picture with no manual adjustments to remove people.  All process through Photoshop Statistics function



This is the basic instructions.
File >Scripts > Statistics. In "Choose Stacks Mode" dialogue, select "Median."

A window opens asking you to select the images.  Additionally I selected the checkbox to have Photoshop align the pictures since I was not using a tripod.  Photoshop will process for a couple of minutes and next thing you know you have a picture without people.  I had one ghost image for a person that if you look closely above you will see because majority still had the person in the same spot.  This could easily be fixed by lining up an image with out the person and masking it off but in general it worked great and was my first attempt at it

Once done I had a little cropping to do because of the slight movement I had from not using a tripod.


Here is a couple of links.  One is a video and the second is the original article that I read this on


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