Quick and Easy Tourist Removal in Photoshop
Being a tourist would be more fun if there weren’t thousands of other tourists getting between you and the shot you want to capture.
When you are visiting a popular location and if you have difficulty getting a photo that is free of people, take two (or more) photos making sure that somewhere in each you have a good clean portion of the sight you are interested in photographing.
On your return you can assemble the images in Photoshop and create one good, tourist free image.
Here’s how to do this with two images. This process relies on a feature called Auto-Align Layers which was first introduced in Photoshop CS3. If you have an earlier version of Photoshop you can manually align the layers but Photoshop won’t do it automatically for you as shown here.
Step 1
Open both images in Photoshop and drag the background layer from one into the other image so you have two different layers in one image. This will be your working image – you can close the other one as you no longer need it.
Step 2
Select both layers in the Layers palette by clicking on one and then Shift + Click on the second. Choose Edit > Auto-Align Layers, click Auto and click Ok.
This feature automatically aligns the layers relative to each other. (You may not have noticed this tool before – it’s on the Edit menu when logic would suggest it should be on the Layers menu.).
Step 3
Select the topmost layer in the image and add a mask to it by selecting the Add Layer Mask icon at the foot of the layers palette.
Step 4
Set black as the foreground color, select a round soft edge brush and click on the mask icon in the layers palette so it is selected.
Step 5
Paint over the person or other thing in the top layer that you want to remove. Painting in black on a mask reveals the layer underneath so you should see the image underneath through this one. (If you need to paint back in some of the image, switch to white foreground color and paint on the mask in white).
Step 6
When you’re done you can merge the layers (Layers > Merge Visible). If you still have other tourists to remove, return to step 1 and continue with another of the images you captured.
If you are done, crop the image and apply any required fixes to the image before saving it.
16 Responses to “Quick and Easy Tourist Removal in Photoshop” - Add Yours
September 16th, 2009 at 1:14 am
Thanks for this method. I’ve always used the clone stamp tool to do this. You set the target point on the image without the tourist, then clone it to the image with the tourist. The problem with the clone method is that you have to clone to exactly the same spot on the “good” image, or it will look out of alignment.
September 16th, 2009 at 1:44 am
Wow! That’s really cool! So much easier then cloning!!
September 16th, 2009 at 2:16 am
Another thing to add to the mix,
If you have CS3 Extended or greater you can use an Image Stack, a.k.a. Statistics (why they cal it that I haven’t a clue) to do the same thing only better…in the image above it should also be able to remove the other two pesky tourist behind the fern.
Here is a tutorial from Mark Johnson describing it better than Adobe did.: http://www.msjphotography.com/index.php/2008/09/photoshop-workbench-144-removing-undesirable-subjects/
September 16th, 2009 at 6:49 am
What a great idea! I’ve always just use the clone stamp tool and have had mixed results depending on where the object is that I want to remove. Now I just have to remember to take a couple pics instead of just the one. thanks for the tip!
September 16th, 2009 at 9:54 am
You can do this a lot easier with image stack Helen.
September 16th, 2009 at 11:55 am
or you can use tourist remover: http://www.snapmania.com/info/en/trm/
September 17th, 2009 at 1:59 am
Can you do this with PhotoShop Elements 7?
September 17th, 2009 at 2:45 am
Wow, never heard of this stacking method. That’s amazing. I always used the method, Helen shows here. I bet for a lot of situations, the stacking won’t do and Helen’s solution is the one to go but if there are no overlapping subjects in the frames, this median stacking seems to be the easiest way.
September 17th, 2009 at 3:05 am
I will say that with the image stack method, the more pictures you have the better. I use it first, but for some reason, sometimes there is ghosting when I don’t have enough pictures. So then I go back to the clone tool. Or one of the other blend tools.
September 17th, 2009 at 3:12 am
Zack in Elements 7, you have the Scene Cleaner which does the same at the click of a single button!
September 17th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
Can you do this in Photoshop CS2 using some plugin? Or do I have to upgrade to CS3? This technique would also he helpful to stitch images into a panorama (which is my hobby!)
September 17th, 2009 at 10:46 pm
I have CS2 and my first thought was that you’d need to use a tripod. Those programmers at Adobe deserve every penny.
September 18th, 2009 at 7:36 am
I’ll meger image for year to get a wider shoot. Great idea. I’ll start practicing this today
September 18th, 2009 at 7:41 am
This is a great tip! Thank you very much for sharing!
September 21st, 2009 at 6:36 am
Another article detailing this technique using earlier versions of Photoshop can be found at http://dsphotographic.com/articles/how-to-remove-tourists-from-your-photos/ . I suspect that the technique can be adapted to any editor capable of using layers and with the facility to move layers in relation to each other. This may be called “align” as in Photoshop or “Move ” as in Paintshop Pro. Could have other names in other editors. I intend to experiment with Paintshop Pro.
September 29th, 2009 at 12:07 am
Thats really great !! but how do i do that in PaintShop Pro Photo X2?
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