Hi there, this is Dimashish, and I've put this short video together to talk about one
of the things that frustrates a lot of us when we're trying to shoot images of public
places, specifically in the city.
You know, you get there early with all your gear, you set up, straighten the image perfectly,
and you wait for that instant when no one else is around, so you can get a clean shot
with the scene.
More often than not, it doesn't really work very well, and that's because public places
by nature are public places.
Everybody else has got as much right to be there as you and I do.
But the challenge becomes, how do you manage to capture a shot where there's no one else
there, but it captures the beauty of the place?
Well, having shot time lapse footage now for a couple of years, I discovered that there's
actually a very simple way to do so, and it involves a very simple technique in Photoshop
involving layer masks.
I put a quick screencast together to demonstrate how I do it.
Check it out.
I've got a set of images over here, 152 to be precise, that I shot at the block arcade
earlier this morning, and there are different frames of people walking about the arcade.
When I put together a still image, I don't necessarily want a lot of people walking around
there because I find them distracting towards the aesthetics of the image.
Now, to be able to remove large groups of people from an image, time lapse footage comes
in handy because, since people keep on moving around, you can use different frames and just
take out the elements that work best.
So, I'm going to start from the first one.
What I'm going to do is just observe which areas work and which areas don't.
So, over here, I've generally got an image that's predominantly uncontaminated.
A couple of elements, these two women over here, this individual walking down the corridor
over here, a couple of folks over here in the corridor, some folks over here, and then
a couple of folks to the right.
So, I'm going to start off with this.
I'm going to hit the five key with this image selected, and that's just going to mark it
so I can filter it easily in Lightroom.
I'm going to go through my collection of images and look for other images where people have
moved around and I can use them.
So, going to the next one, the next image has the women having moved from here, so I'm
going to go ahead and mark that with the five.
I still need to find someone in that area having moved and left it clean, so let's keep
looking through.
I can probably use that one, which I'm marking with the five because that's the column which
has not been contaminated, let's carry on a little bit more, and at this stage we find
that there's no one over here, and predominantly no one over here, so I'm going to go ahead
hit five over there to select that frame, and let's continue on, we've got people on
the right still there, and we just need to find a frame that will work for us.
So here's one that will kind of sort of work, we've got most people having disappeared from
here, so let's go ahead hit five, select that frame, continue to move on.
Now this will work to remove anyone from this corner, so I'm going to go ahead and hit five
on this to select this frame, and I just need to see if I can find a frame where there's
no one in this section, let's keep going.
That one will work as will that one.
So this stage I think we've selected enough frames, so what I'm going to do is I'm going
to hit G to go back into grid view, and I'm going to go ahead and use the filters to look
for anything that's rated, and that'll display all the images that we've selected as potential
frames to clean it out of random individuals walking in and out of the image.
Now the next stage is to develop each of these with the exact same settings, so I'm going
to select the first one, and I'm going to hit the develop module.
Now I could go ahead and do this the hard way, or I could use one of the presets that
I've created, and I'm going to use my architecture preset set, and I'm going to use the one called
naturally lit Victorian architecture just to give it a little bit of total variation.
I am going to add a couple of minor items, so I'm going to go ahead and enable any lens
corrections.
I'm going to double check and see if I do need to rotate this image, and it looks like
it needs an ever so slight rotation, probably about that much to keep it perfectly horizontal.
Now I shot this with a fisheye lens, and fisheye lenses cause walls to curve in, so I'm going
to go ahead and crank the distort field up, just cause that to flatten out a little bit,
if that kind of works.
I tend to feel that there's a little bit too much yellow in this, so what I'm going to
do is I'm going to go to the highlight saturation and luminance controls, go to saturation,
and I'm going to take the yellow out, so I'm just going to pull it back to maybe negative
50, doesn't look that yellow there.
So that looked pretty decent.
Notice that I'm not going to go ahead and crop anything at this stage.
So now that I've applied this to one image, I'm going to hit G to go back into grid view,
I'm going to select the image, to control shift C to copy all the settings, I'm going
to hit check all so that all the attributes are copied, I'm going to hit copy, then I'm
going to go ahead and select the rest, to control shift V to paste settings, and what
you'll notice is that all the images end up taking on more of the attributes that I've
applied to this.
So what this has done is that it's ensured that there is a consistent look and feel to
every single one of these images.
Alright, so having done that, I'm going to do a control A to select all, I'm going to
right click, and I'm going to do an edit in Adobe Photoshop CS6.
What this is going to do is that it's going to open each of these images, all raw files
in Photoshop, where we're going to stack them in layers and use the technique of masking
to remove people who are moving around randomly in the image.
So here we are in Photoshop, and it's gone ahead and opened all the images up one at
a time.
So what we're going to do is we're going to go all the way to the left and select the
first image, and you'll notice that there's a background layer already created.
We're going to go to each image, do a control A to select the entire image, control C to
copy, come back to the first one, and do a control V. You'll see that it's pasted in
as another layer.
So we're going to work our way through each of the images, let's close that one out,
so you can just copy the content over, and do this for every single one of the images.
Do a control C, and a control V to create the additional layers.
So here we are, we've got the background plus seven layers.
Now what we're going to do to each layer, we're going to go ahead and apply a layer
mask.
So just select the layer and click on the layer mask button down here.
Now what we're going to do is that we're going to turn off all the other layers and
just work through this image one layer at a time.
So the bottom layer, this is what we have.
If we activate the next layer up and select the layer mask, we can now start working on
things.
Now the way on how masking works is that anything that's painted white is revealed, anything
that's painted black is concealed.
And notice that you've got black and white set over here as your primary colors.
So what we're going to do is we're going to use a paintbrush tool, something with a soft
edge, and we probably want it to be a little bit larger, I'm just going to go ahead and
adjust the size a little bit.
And ensuring that I am working on the layer, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to
paint over those elements that I don't want, kind of helps if I have the correct colors
selected.
So there you go, just paint over these guys, and you'll notice that you've got something
over here that you probably don't want, we'll work through it.
Once again, we'll get rid of these individuals, now there's somebody else over there, and
we can get rid of these folks over here.
Don't worry, there's a lot still over here, having a conversation, we can get rid of
some of the crowd there.
So anyhow, as that layer is done as much as it can, let's activate the next layer, select
the layer mask, we've still got our paintbrush selected, and just paint over those elements
that we want to remove.
Let's see, we want to remove these guys over here, we want to remove that person over there,
there we go, and there we are, so that's what that layer has taken care of.
Let's move to the next layer, and let's see what we can work with, activate it, paint
him out again, paint these folks out, paint them out, and then on this side, paint these
folks out, and maybe just over there, and still got a bit of this person over here, but that's
all right, we'll work through.
Go up to the next layer, activate it, and you see this time this layer has taken care of
this, we can get, oopsie, just ensure that the mask is selected, we can get rid of this
person over here, this person over there, let's get rid of this over here, probably just keep
that over there, so this has predominantly taken care of most things, let's get the next
layer up, activate it, once again we don't need these folks over here, let's see if there
is any point in having this layer at all, there we are, next layer up, activate it, and
that's why, that's been taken care of, and let's see what happens when we activate the
little layer, it's probably not even worth having that in there, because I'm not sure
it's even going to remove anything, and in which case we can probably just get rid of
that, and then we've got all of this sorted, what we can do, let's get a layer, flatten
image, and that's gone ahead and flattened it to where you don't have any additional
layers, you can now do any other sort of correction that you might want to, use the adaptive wide
angle filter to correct this for a fisheye lens, there's a fisheye at 8mm with a crop
factor of 2, and that will take it in just a little bit, there you go, I might choose
to do a little bit of cropping, I might set it to a constrain of 16-9, which gives it
a decent aspect ratio, so if I place that over there, and bring this in just a little
bit, just make sure it's centered, that kind of works, let's take it back a little bit,
keeping it at 16-9, and just going to be about there.
That ought to be about right, so there you have it, a completed scene that's been completely
flattened, now I could do some more stuff using some of my funky filters, such as noise
out, just to go ahead and take any noise out, I'm just going to go ahead and give it a generic
default setting, and you will notice that what that does is that it takes out any heavy
noise out, and that brings it to a complete image, so there you have it, that's how I
would go about removing people out of busy scenes to get what I refer to as a clean image.
So as you can see, it's quite a simple technique, now I don't invent this, this has been around
for quite a while, I just happened to see the light, all of a sudden when I was going
through a lot of my footage, and realizing that I could actually use this single image
of this scene together with no one else around, so I hope you found this useful, until next
time, enjoy photography.
