In this video,
I'm going to show you
how to remove people from photos in Photoshop.
Hi, welcome back to the Photoshop Training Channel.
I'm Jesus Ramirez.
In this video, I'm going to show you how to remove people
from crowded places in Photoshop.
We're going to use Stack Modes and Statistics for that,
and I know that you may now know
what that means yet, but you will at the endof the tutorial.
Before we actually start with the tutorial, I want to mention that this is a follow-up
to a previous tutorial that I did, called
"How to Remove Anything from a Photo in Photoshop".
In that tutorial, we used three different techniques to remove the distracting element.
We used Content-Aware Fill,
the Patch Tool,
and the Clone Stamp Tool.
In that tutorial, I used one image, and I used one of those techniques or tools
to remove the distracting element.
In other words, I did all of the manual work myself.
In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how you can let the camera and Photoshop do all
the hard work, and we just put it together with one click.
Okay.
Let's get started.
We're going to work with 14 photos of the Louvre museum in Paris, France, that I show
with my cell phone.
Obviously, this technique requires a little bit of work and preparation, but it's all
worth it in the end, and as you can see,
the images are of people walking through the museum.
And what I'm going to do is tell Photoshop to take all these photos, put them together,
and remove the people from the photos.
And we're going to do that with a Stack Mode.
Stack Modes are a set of algorithms that combine images together in different forms.
Usually they're used for forensics, medical, or astrophotographic images, but in this case,
we're going to use them to remove people from photos.
So, what you want to do is go into Photoshop, of course, and go into file, scripts, and
statistics.
And from this statistics dialogue, we need to load all the images in there.
So, we need to select the folder where we have our images, so I'm going to click on
browse, then click on the folder, and click on select folder, and you'll see the 14 images
were loaded onto the image statistic dialogue box.
Now, I shot these images with my cell phone.
And the best way of doing this is to do it with a real camera and on a tripod, so that
the images don't move, so if you are going to use a cell phone, I recommend standing
very, very still as you shoot your photos.
And what you want to do is shoot as many photos as you can, about 20 or 30 seconds apart,
so that people have enough time to move.
So, if you're shooting a building and there's people walking through, just give them enough
time so that they move, and then take a photo.
So, in this case, I took 14 photos, and I was not using a tripod, so I'm going to let
Photoshop automatically align them for me,
or at the very least, try to align them for me.
So, make sure that attempt to Automatically align source images is selected, then select
the Stack Mode.
And again, the Stack Mode is the algorithm
that determines how these images are going to blend.
We're going to choose the median Stack Mode,
and the median Stack Mode take a statistical average
of all the photos.
In other words, it keep the constant pixels, and it removes the pixels that are not constant.
So people, cars, and other things that are moving through the scene are going to disappear.
Then, press OK.
And you'll see that Photoshop is going to load images as layers in the layers panel,
then it's going to attempt to align those images,
and finally, it will apply that Stack Mode.
And as you can see, it removed everyone from the photo, because it looked at all the images,
and it kept the constant pixels.
Again, people are moving, cars are moving, they've not constant, so they magically disappear.
So, it does a really, really good job, really quickly.
So, think about this technique next time you're traveling, and you want to remove tourists
from your vacation photos in Photoshop.
In the layers panel, notice that we have a smart object, and this icon represents an
image stack.
And if I click on the down-pointing arrow, you will see that this stack of images has
the median Stack Mode applied.
Unfortunately, if I don't click on it, you won't be able to edit it.
If you want to edit it, you can go into Layer, smart objects, Stack Mode,
and select a different Stack Mode.
For example, we can select minimum, and now we have a much more crowded scene, but that's
not what we want.
So, I'm going to go back into Layer, Smart Objects, Stack Mode, Median.
If you want to find out what the other Stack Modes do, I'm going to place a link in the
description that describes what they do.
And this is not the end of the tutorial.
There's still a couple of things that we need to do in order to refine this image, and these
things generally happen with this technique, so let me show you what they are.
If I zoom in, you'll notice that we didn't completely remove everyone from the phot.
There's still this person here, and then part of another person there.
And we can easily fix that by creating a new layer, and I'll call it heal because I'm going
to use the spot-healing brush tool for that.
So, select the spot-healing brush tool.
Now it's set to normal by default, and most people don't ever use the modes, but I recommend
using two of those modes.
Either darken or lighten.
So, what you need to do is look at your image and think of the distracting element in your
image.
And this could be a blemish on somebody's face, or in this case, that arm or whatever
it is that's left over from the Stack Mode, but look at it and think, is it darker or
brighter than the background?
In this case, it's darker than the background, so we want to lighten it.
So, I'm going to select the lighten blending mode, and I'm just going to paint to easily
remove that.
Now the reason that this works better than the normal mode is that it protects the brighter
pixels.
So, it protects the original detail.
Let me show you what I mean by that.
If I just scroll down and I start painting in this area here, you'll notice that I'm
just going to remove the dark areas, but I still keep the brighter areas.
So, I'm still keeping some of the original detail.
I'm going to undo that.
Then I'm going to go into the normal mode, and I'm just going to paint.
And you'll notice now that Photoshop introduces a lot of detail that doesn't make the image
fit or work.
So, I always recommend using these modes.
Always think, is my distracting element dark, or bright?
If it's dark, you want to lighten it; if it's bright, you want to darken it.
And then select the appropriate mode for that.
And if you want to find out more about this tool and the different modes, and how it can
help you with your re-touching, then check out my video on the spot-healing brush tool.
I'll post a link to it right below in the description.
But anyway, I'm going to undo these changes, and I'm going to fit the image to screen.
I think I pressed undo too many time, so let me remove this person once again, and you
can do that for the rest of the image.
I'm not going to take the time to do that, just to save a little bit of time, but in
your image, spend some time and get those details.
Now the second problem that usually happens with this technique is that there's sometimes
things that belong in the image, but that are moving.
Things like clouds, flags, water, and things like that that are always moving, and they
belong in the photo.
Notice what happened to the clouds.
We got this really interesting effect just because the clouds were moving.
And by the way, I just double-clicked on the thumbnail for the smart object, which opened
up the Smart Object in a new tab, and we can see all the original images.
And as you can see, the people are moving, but so are the clouds, which is why we got
that really weird effect.
And we can easily fix that by selecting the rectangular marquee tool, clicking and dragging
over the image making a selection.
And then going into edit, copy merge, and then go back into our working document, edit,
paste special, paste in place, and there it is.
Now the clouds are back.
We do have a little problem here with the seam, but we can easily fix that by creating
a layer mask, then select the brush tool.
And make sure that the hardness is set to zero so that you have a soft brush.
Black is my foreground color, so I can paint with black on the layer mask to hide those
pixels.
And the image now looks much, much better.
Now that we've fixed those issues, we're going to put the image together into one single
smart object and enhance it even more.
So, I'm going to click on the topmost layer, hold shift, click on the bottom layer to select
all the layers; then I'm going to right click and select convert into smart object.
So, what we just did is take all of those elements, put them into a single smart object,
and with the smart object, we can apply distortions, filters, adjustments, non-destructively.
We can always come back and edit the contents that we need to.
So, with this smart object, I'm going to go into filter, camera raw filter.
The camera raw filter allows you to adjust the tonality and colors of your images.
And I'm going to use it to enhance the image.
I'm going to start by darkening the highlights, brightening the shadows.
Adding contract to the mid-tones by increasing the Clarity and use Vibrance to add saturation
to the image.
Vibrance protects highly-saturated pixels and skin tones.
Then I'm going to sharpen it a bit, and one of the things that happens with this technique
is that it removes noise.
So, this image doesn't have any noise, so we need to bring some noise back, just so
that it's a little more natural.
So, I'm going to go into the effects tab, and add just a little bit of grain.
Let me set my view to 100% so that we can see how much grain we're adding.
So maybe for, you don't want to add too much, just a little bit in there, because the original
image had a little bit of grain.
Press OK when you're done.
Now talking about grain and noise,
this technique can also be used
to remove noise from images. your
So, if you're shooting a photo and you know that it's going to have some noise, you can
shoot several photos, and then apply this technique to remove a lot of that noise.
So, that is another use for the Stack Mode.
Now I'm going to select the crop tool, and then click and drag on the corner handles
to crop the image, then hover over the corner of the crop, and click and drag to rotate
to straighten the horizon.
Then I'm going to move it over by dragging it.
I want that line right over the pyramid to use the rule of thirds, and that's before
and after.
Let me know in the comments which of these was your favorite technique, and if you knew
about Stack Modes already.
Also, if you decide to create something using this tutorial, then upload it to Instagram
with the hashtag ptcvids.
I would love to see what you come up with.
And if this is your first time at the Photoshop training channel, then don't forget to click
on the subscribe and notification buttons.
Thank you so much for watching.
I will talk to you again very soon.