Tip of The Day: Remove Tourists From Your Photos

Everyone probably has a few dozen otherwise beautiful shots that have been ruined by tourists cluttering the composition. It’s not always possible to wait for everyone to leave to take your shot, so luckily there are a lot of options to remove tourists once you get home:

Microsoft Research’s Group Shot allows you to choose the favorite parts of each image in a series of shots and composite them together to create a single shot.

Futurelabs Tourist Remover does something similar but in a more automated fashion, allowing you to choose as many images as you want to blend together, its best for images with relatively sparse crowds as it needs a significant portion of the background visible.

If you’d rather do the work yourself, DSPhotographic walks you through the process using the masking, layers and eraser tool in Photoshop.

Another DIY method from photonews.com shows you how to use image stacks and the align content feature in Photoshop CS3. Update: The Stacks mode only works with Photoshop CS3 extended, which is an additional $350 on top of the CS3 base price. For  more on this feature, check out these tutorial's by Online Technology Editor Jack Howard. (here and here).
(via Photojojo )
—Matthew Panzarino
Contributing Blogger