TUTORIAL: Remove people from photos
Do you ever need to remove someone from a photo? How about a whole crowd? I've thought about doing this tutorial for a while, but someone on my flist mentioned some frustration with it, so I was inspired to assist.
How To Remove Stuff In Photoshop
(Crossposted to coell_icons)
If I use a term or a tool that you're not familiar with, ask me to explain, or you can look up how to use all the tools, or I recommend you just open them all up and play with them -- you start picking up tricks the more you poke around. You might also pick up lots of shortcuts too. <3.
The only way to remove something from a photo is to cover it up with something else. Usually there is enough stuff in the photo to smudge and clone, but you can also borrow pieces from similar photos.
This is a picture from High School Musical that anteka wanted to use for a backdrop, but with different people. I don't know what East Side High looks like behind the crowd, so I had to do some guessing and borrowing. When I made hers, I didn't take screencaps along the way, so I'm recreating most of it here. Let's do this!
Looks like I'll need to replace some sidewalk, brick walls, windows, and planters - but there are already pieces of those in the photo, so I'll copy them. The tricky parts will be things that I don't have any view of -- the doors, the grass, and where the ground meets the building.
1. Use Smudge (
) to push the linear spots around. With practice you'll get fast at knowing whether to Smudge or Clone.
Hold the Shift key after you click to keep a line straight vertically or horizontally. If you want a diagonal Smudge to keep straight, click one end and shift-click the other -- Photoshop will connect the clicks for you, providing a straight line between the two points, and will continue connecting your next shift-clicks, if you want to create a zig-zig for example. Shift-clicking straight lines also works with the paint tools.
2. Use the Clone Stamp (
) to replicate texture. If something had a solid color and no texture, you could Smudge or use Eyedropper to pull the color and Paint with it. But sidewalk, brick, and most anything photographic has variations, so instead of pulling up a color, you pull up a texture.
Alt-click to set the origin, or the spot you want to copy from. The next place you click will set the relationship, or where you want to copy to. If the Aligned setting is off, each time you click will start painting from your origin. If Aligned is on, the origin will move according to the relationship you set.
3. Use Polyagonal Marquee selection tool (
) to define or protect shapes that need to be created, like masking but without using Mask mode. Outline what should be there and use various smudging, paint, and clones to fill in the shapes.
While you are using any selection tools, Shift-click to add to the selection, or Alt-click to subtract from it. You can use Ctrl-plus and Ctrl-minus to zoom in and out. Space-click to grab the artboard and drag to change your view -- I call this grab-scooting, so you can zoom and move around the image quickly to get what you need, never having to change brushes or end your polygonal marquee if you're in the middle of drawing one. I used poly-masks for the plant boxes and defining the area between brick and sidewalk:
4. Use Lasso (
) to copy objects or sections of image. You could use the Clone Stamp, but you have to deal with the origin/relationship grabbing more than you want, so instead just select precise pieces and copy them right where you need them. You can Control-Alt-Click inside your selection to Copy-Drag it. This does not put the piece on a new layer -- it only allows you to move/transform that floating piece until you deselect. Once you deselect, the piece flattens onto the background and you lose whatever was behind it.
If you need more ways to manipulate the piece (rotate/scale/contrast/etc) before you flatten it, copy it to a new layer. This way you can copy more than you need. Hide the layer and select the stuff you want to keep on the background, Invert selection, Show layer, and delete -- now you have the perfect shape covering what you didn't need. Flatten.
For example, all the windows on the bottom floors need sills, so I can copy one off of the second floor and Copy-Drag it onto all that need it. I do this for sections of brick, leaves, and trees too:
Now the only things left (doors, grass, and foundation) I don't have any pieces in this image, so I'll have to find another image to borrow from. All she had was a screencap, but it had the parts I need.
5. Find and select pieces from other photos:
(Later someone showed me the original high school the movie was filmed at -- I wished I'd seen that version before!)
6. Copy-paste each piece into your image on its own layer. Being on its own layer means you can switch to the (Ctrl-T) Free Transform bounding box to scale, rotate ... and the real magic -- Distort! Hold the Alt key while you drag a corner and that corner will move independently. This way you can change the angles of things so they fit your image's perspective:
7. Use Brightness/Contrast and Color Balance to make the new pieces fit the color atmosphere of your image:
(I'll use a poly-mask to Clone in the sidewalk up to the doors, since the sidewalks are too different between photos.)
8. Use Burn (
) and eyedropped Paint set to 20% Multipy (within poly-masks of course) to fill in where shadows are supposed to be:
9. Use Blur (
) to soften the edges of the pieces you poly-masked or copied in. Real photos don't have sharp edges, so this will help everything sink in and look more realistic. I also went around and did some fine-detail Smudging and Cloning, plus I added some grass because I wasn't thrilled with how the brick butts right up against the sidewalk. That's it!
To see an animation that shows the difference, click here (700kb)
This is the Difference layer, which I think is neat -- pixels that stayed the same between the two versions are black, but the color gets inverted for any parts that changed. Looks like some unique header/wallpaper, eh?
:-B Enjoy! This method works whether you're removing that pesky telephone pole from your otherwise scenic beauty - or cutting your ex out of a group photo (beats scissors or fire!) This was just a quick fix for a photo, so the building angles are a little Beetleguised, but you can take more care to make your cover-ups practically undetectable.
Feel free to pimp this, since this is also the method I use for creating crack and we all need more Crack!Manips in the world.
How To Remove Stuff In Photoshop
(Crossposted to coell_icons)
If I use a term or a tool that you're not familiar with, ask me to explain, or you can look up how to use all the tools, or I recommend you just open them all up and play with them -- you start picking up tricks the more you poke around. You might also pick up lots of shortcuts too. <3.
The only way to remove something from a photo is to cover it up with something else. Usually there is enough stuff in the photo to smudge and clone, but you can also borrow pieces from similar photos.
This is a picture from High School Musical that anteka wanted to use for a backdrop, but with different people. I don't know what East Side High looks like behind the crowd, so I had to do some guessing and borrowing. When I made hers, I didn't take screencaps along the way, so I'm recreating most of it here. Let's do this!
Looks like I'll need to replace some sidewalk, brick walls, windows, and planters - but there are already pieces of those in the photo, so I'll copy them. The tricky parts will be things that I don't have any view of -- the doors, the grass, and where the ground meets the building.
1. Use Smudge (
) to push the linear spots around. With practice you'll get fast at knowing whether to Smudge or Clone.
Hold the Shift key after you click to keep a line straight vertically or horizontally. If you want a diagonal Smudge to keep straight, click one end and shift-click the other -- Photoshop will connect the clicks for you, providing a straight line between the two points, and will continue connecting your next shift-clicks, if you want to create a zig-zig for example. Shift-clicking straight lines also works with the paint tools.
2. Use the Clone Stamp (
) to replicate texture. If something had a solid color and no texture, you could Smudge or use Eyedropper to pull the color and Paint with it. But sidewalk, brick, and most anything photographic has variations, so instead of pulling up a color, you pull up a texture.
Alt-click to set the origin, or the spot you want to copy from. The next place you click will set the relationship, or where you want to copy to. If the Aligned setting is off, each time you click will start painting from your origin. If Aligned is on, the origin will move according to the relationship you set.
3. Use Polyagonal Marquee selection tool (
) to define or protect shapes that need to be created, like masking but without using Mask mode. Outline what should be there and use various smudging, paint, and clones to fill in the shapes.
While you are using any selection tools, Shift-click to add to the selection, or Alt-click to subtract from it. You can use Ctrl-plus and Ctrl-minus to zoom in and out. Space-click to grab the artboard and drag to change your view -- I call this grab-scooting, so you can zoom and move around the image quickly to get what you need, never having to change brushes or end your polygonal marquee if you're in the middle of drawing one. I used poly-masks for the plant boxes and defining the area between brick and sidewalk:
4. Use Lasso (
) to copy objects or sections of image. You could use the Clone Stamp, but you have to deal with the origin/relationship grabbing more than you want, so instead just select precise pieces and copy them right where you need them. You can Control-Alt-Click inside your selection to Copy-Drag it. This does not put the piece on a new layer -- it only allows you to move/transform that floating piece until you deselect. Once you deselect, the piece flattens onto the background and you lose whatever was behind it.
If you need more ways to manipulate the piece (rotate/scale/contrast/etc) before you flatten it, copy it to a new layer. This way you can copy more than you need. Hide the layer and select the stuff you want to keep on the background, Invert selection, Show layer, and delete -- now you have the perfect shape covering what you didn't need. Flatten.
For example, all the windows on the bottom floors need sills, so I can copy one off of the second floor and Copy-Drag it onto all that need it. I do this for sections of brick, leaves, and trees too:
Now the only things left (doors, grass, and foundation) I don't have any pieces in this image, so I'll have to find another image to borrow from. All she had was a screencap, but it had the parts I need.
5. Find and select pieces from other photos:
(Later someone showed me the original high school the movie was filmed at -- I wished I'd seen that version before!)
6. Copy-paste each piece into your image on its own layer. Being on its own layer means you can switch to the (Ctrl-T) Free Transform bounding box to scale, rotate ... and the real magic -- Distort! Hold the Alt key while you drag a corner and that corner will move independently. This way you can change the angles of things so they fit your image's perspective:
7. Use Brightness/Contrast and Color Balance to make the new pieces fit the color atmosphere of your image:
(I'll use a poly-mask to Clone in the sidewalk up to the doors, since the sidewalks are too different between photos.)
8. Use Burn (
) and eyedropped Paint set to 20% Multipy (within poly-masks of course) to fill in where shadows are supposed to be:
9. Use Blur (
) to soften the edges of the pieces you poly-masked or copied in. Real photos don't have sharp edges, so this will help everything sink in and look more realistic. I also went around and did some fine-detail Smudging and Cloning, plus I added some grass because I wasn't thrilled with how the brick butts right up against the sidewalk. That's it!
To see an animation that shows the difference, click here (700kb)
This is the Difference layer, which I think is neat -- pixels that stayed the same between the two versions are black, but the color gets inverted for any parts that changed. Looks like some unique header/wallpaper, eh?
:-B Enjoy! This method works whether you're removing that pesky telephone pole from your otherwise scenic beauty - or cutting your ex out of a group photo (beats scissors or fire!) This was just a quick fix for a photo, so the building angles are a little Beetleguised, but you can take more care to make your cover-ups practically undetectable.
Feel free to pimp this, since this is also the method I use for creating crack and we all need more Crack!Manips in the world.