Make tourists disappear… in Photoshop

How many times has your travel photography been let down by tourists and other unwanted distractions spoiling your scenes?

No need to waste your pictures. Our simple 4-step tutorial below explains how you can remove people in Photoshop and rescue your images.

Our original image

How to remove people in Photoshop

01 Open images from Bridge
Open Adobe Bridge and select ‘FastFix01_Before.NEF’ on the DVD. Hold down Shift and click onto ‘FastFix02_Before.NEF’. Both images are now selected. From the File menu, select Tools>Photoshop>Load Files Into Photoshop Layers. Both Raw files will open directly into Photoshop, bypassing Adobe Camera Raw.

02 Align the layers
In Photoshop, take a look at the Layers Panel. You will see that both images are now stacked into one document. There’s a slight difference in composition between the two layers so to align them, go to Edit>Auto-Align Layers. In the Dialog Box that appears, leave the Auto option selected and click OK.

03 Remove tourists
Make sure that the sharper of the  two images ‘FastFix01_Before.NEF’ is the top layer and click the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers Panel. Select a black brush, then paint over the tourists to remove them. Select the Crop tool (hit C) and draw a crop around the entire image.

04 Tidy messy shadows
Hold down Shift and resize the crop box, removing any overlap between the two image layers. Select the Clone Stamp tool (hit S), hold down Alt and click on the path to select a clone source. Use this to clean up the shadows in the foreground. Repeat the cloning to remove the tree in the top right corner to finish.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2012 at 4:15 pm and is filed under Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a comment. Pinging is currently not allowed.