Too Many People

Have you ever gone to a popular destination and wanted to take some pictures of it, only to find that it is impossible to get a nice shot without anyone in the picture? Take a look at the example below of San Francisco City Hall we took:

If you look closely you can see people standing in the doorway of the building as well as near it. Also some people are walking behind the fence. If you have Photoshop CS5 you can use content aware fill, and this will get rid of some of the people, however it does not do a good job for areas such as behind the fence or in the doorway.

One key to make your life a lot easier when you are trying to get rid of the people is to take a lot of pictures of the scene, in this case we took about 20 pictures of the same thing. The reason for this is in each photo the people for the most part are not going to be in the same place. What we did in Photoshop was first used content aware on the easy parts to get rid of.

The harder parts such as the door we took some other images we had of the scene where no one was there, we took that photo and put it in a layer with the main photo we were working with. We then took a layer mask and painted in the door where nobody was standing, we did this as for other problem areas as well. After doing this we got and image of the scene below, which has no people in it:

As you can see no more people are in the picture, and it was not that hard to do. To see the final touched up full sized image please visit our website at http://www.stoutandstout.com/ , this image as well as others can be purchased at our website.