I'm very excited about the new Scalado Remove App for Android/iPhone. Let's say you're taking a picture of your friend in front of a landmark with several people walking by. The app allows you to remove the people from the photo, leaving only the background and your friend. The app isn't just doing a clone of the surrounding image to paint over unwanted subjects. It's actually taking multiple images, detecting which objects are moving, and letting you select them for removal. This sounds awesome! But I don't want to be limited to taking pictures with a smart phone.
I would like to take multiple photos of the same scene. (Maybe with a tripod, but it would be better if I didn't have to use a tripod.) Then I would somehow blend them together to remove unwanted elements. How do I do that? I know there are tons of photoshop tutorials out there, but all the ones I find just tell you how to use the clone tool.
Answer
To do this in Photoshop (Available in Photoshop Extended and later CC versions only):
- File > Scripts > Load Files into Stack
- Select all layers and use Edit > Auto Align to align them (if necessary)
- Layer > Smart Objects > Convert to Smart Object
- Layer > Smart Objects > Stack Mode and choose Median
This will compare pixels between all your images that you've stacked, and use the median value, which means if a person was in a spot in one or two frames, but that spot was empty in 6-8 frames, Photoshop will use the most common value (which is were there was no person there).
This would remove most "ghosts" from the image. You could then manually mask out anything left with Mark J P's method. If there is still someone there (because they were sitting in one spot in all your frames, THEN you will have to resort to the clone tool.
It looks like this feature has been around since CS3. PhotoshopNews has a description and tutorial with example images here
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