How to Quickly and Easily Remove People From a Crowded Photo Automatically Using Photoshop

There are a ton of beautiful tourist spots out there begging to be photographed, but the problem is that unless you are extremely lucky, you will likely have to deal with people in the shot. You could take a bunch of photographs as people move around and then painstakingly mask in different parts of the image, or you could try this neat method that lets Photoshop take care of it automatically in just a few seconds, as this helpful video tutorial shows. 

Coming to you from AdobeMasters, this great video tutorial will show you how to remove people from images easily and automatically using Photoshop. In this case, you will be using the median stack method. Before you try it out, it is important to note that you need multiple images of the same scene, spaced across enough time that people can move throughout the frame. The reason for this is that using the median method, Photoshop will look at every pixel across the entire stack, and assign each pixel its median (middle number value). This tends to filter out anomalies like a person briefly standing in a spot and leaves the permanent parts of the scene instead, and unlike an average, their presence does not get factored into the exposure once they're filtered out. It's a very powerful and lesser-known technique. Check out the video above for the full rundown. 

Alex Cooke's picture

Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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2 Comments

I didn’t know about this method, thanks!

That is pretty nifty.