Did you ever just want to take a photo of a nice Fountain or Street Scene but there are way too many people around and no matter how much time you wait and wait you can not get the Magical Moment where there is not one straying into the foreground or background.

Well the FutureLab Group has come up with a solution. It is called the Tourist Remover. You may be asking if this is some sort of fancy Retouching service - Well No Not really - They require a series of photos taken of the same spot.

On their How to page the recommend that you use a tripod and use the manual metering to get a consistent color and area.

What happens with this service when you feed your photos into it. It will help you remove all the annoying distractions that you didn’t want in the photo.

Below is an example I copied from their website:

I can see this being useful at the Theme park or Historical Landmark and you want to get a great photo of the Disney Castle or National Landmark without all the inconsiderate people walking behind or in front of your camera.

Now to the that great image you create it afterwards by just taking a series of photo and piece the best parts together from each image.

I have performed this in the digital darkroom before by using Photoshop.
The Basic steps are as follows:

1) Take a series of photos 3 or more - The more the better of the same exact scene you want to have. Make sure you get all the background at various stages of the people walking or even cars (One photo the people on the left - One where they are on the right Don’t try to get them always at the same place or you will not have the background covered.) See above image.

2) Open all the images you have in Photoshop and put each image on a separate layer.

3) Starting at the top layer using the eraser tool Remove what you don’t want on that layer.

4) Switch to the next lowest layer Remove what you don’t want on that layer. Repeat with the next lower layer until you have all the items (People Cars Birds Etc..) Removed.

5) Flatten Image.

6) You now have a composite image of the scene without all the distractions.

You now should have that perfect image to be proud of. And it was quicker then hanging around half a day to get that perfect moment!

If would would like me to do a more detailed post about the above process - Email me or Post a comment.

Digital Alan

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