Photoshop to empty crowded places

Post update on 14.Aug.2016

Taking pictures on interesting places, especially on holidays, you experience people walking into your picture or the place is crowded, that there is noch chance to take appealing pictures.

Introduction

In such a situation you have to answer yourself take the picture with all the people running arround, which is surely closer to reality or without the people. You hae to decide.

On the other hand, the request to present the point of interest in a picture without all the people is comprehensive. This leads us to the question how do i vanish all those people.

Technique

First of all you’ll need a steady tripod. The advice to vanish people by using a strong ND filter, e.g. ND1000x, only works, if all the people are in movement. If somebody just stops for a small part of the long exposure you’ll get a ghost image 😉

To avoid the problem with ghost people we take a series of pictures. It doesn’t matter if picture taking is made with the same interval. The number of pictures to be taken depends on the situation. You can try to follow the movements and take a picture, where every part of the place is not crowded by people.

Screencast

Since many screenshots are not as good like a video, i’ll present you the screencast.

Conclusion

The introduced relativly simple technique can be combined with the long exposure shots. In this case you only have to mask the ghosts on every layer.

Since Photoshop Elements and Gimp are capable of handling layers this technique could be transferred to this programs.

Any way this technique is simple to use, both on the picture taking and later on in Photoshop. But if should aplly this technique to your photos, that’s on your side to decide.

If you like this small article i would be happy. I you like, leave me a comment or suggestion or any question you like.

ciao tuxoche