Remove Tourists from a Scene?

Okay, this is part camera technique and part Photoshop magic, but it’s some pretty cool magic I have to admit. It starts with you, ideally, shooting on a tripod, so your camera is perfectly still while you do the camera technique. So, first, put your camera on the tripod, and then take a shot every 10 to 15 seconds. Do this until you have about 10 or 15 images of the scene. Open those 10 or 15 images in Photoshop, so all of the images are open at the same time in different windows (or tabs, if you have this preference turned on). Next, go under the File menu, under Scripts, and choose Statistics. From the Choose Stack Mode pop-up menu, at the top of the dialog, choose Median. Now, click on the Add Open Files button to include all the 10 or 15 images you just opened. Click the OK button, and Photoshop analyzes the images looking for movement. As it compares all 10 or 15 images, anything that moves gets removed—as long as the tourists are moving through your images, they get removed. If one of your tourists decides to sit down, they’ll still be there when the process is done. So, the key is to get everybody to move (and yes, I have had to have a friend go and ask someone to move while doing this technique. But, all I had to do was get them to move just a couple of feet—that was all I needed for it to work, and it did). If it leaves anything behind that you’d like to clean up, just grab the Clone Stamp tool (S), Option-click (PC: Alt-click) on a clean area to sample, and then just clone over what you want to remove.