DSLR Photography Forum

What do you do if you're in a beautiful scenic spot, surrounded by hundreds of tourists who happen to be in your frame as well? You could spend some time in photoshop cloning them out (or maybe use the new content aware fill) - but here's an interesting alternative. Basically, they say to use a tripod and take lots of photos of the same scene, then use Photoshop statistics / stacks mode to stack them all and "average" them out.

Assuming that the people are moving in and out of the frame, it goes to reason that the most common pixels among all the images will be of the background scene so voila - you'll have a people-free photo.

http://submit.shutterstock.com/newslette...icle2.html

It looks like a pretty amazing technique - here is the before and after:

Another really good way to get people-free photos is to use a really big camera, run to the side until you're out of the frame that you want, act really excited and take lots of photos, and when everyone's over there looking that way, slip back and take your original photo.

Lol...

Or, put your camera a tripod, set timer to 2 minutes, then shout at the top of your lungs "there's a BOMB!!" and run as fast as you can...

Excellent idea. Jules - that would work well

Yes, but then the authorities show up just as your camera is starting to beep, and next thing you know there's one less Nikon D3s in the world.

But seriously: the software that I use for focus stacking, noise removal, and up-rezzing photos also does moving object removal. (Photoacute.) I can't imagine how many photos a busy scene like this would take (although the author of the linked article says it was only twenty-five, shot over a quarter of an hour) - or why processing it would involve overcooking the image in the process.

The other option is to use an ND filter to get a longer exposure, and let the people average themselves away. I once used a sixty-second exposure - at night, but still with an ND filter - to get rid of the pedestrians on The Strip in Las Vegas. There's still some shadows on the sidewalk that don't quite make sense, but those were more difficult conditions, and there's no reason not to combine the two techniques.

That would of saved me a lot of time on this image.

Matthew beat me to the ND+small aperture solution, though maybe not as worthwhile at smaller apertures as on medium/large format.
Nice shot there Craig!