Traveling the world can be a life changing experience. You journey to exotic locations to see the beautiful scenery and incredible landscapes. But everybody else decided to travel to the same place you, and the place is packed with tourists.
As photographers we all want to take beautiful pictures of these locations. It can be difficult to photograph these places when everybody else is also there to see these places. Because there are so many people there it is hard or even impossible to find a composition without somebody walking through your shot. But with Photoshop, you can turn a series of pictures that have people in them, into a picture with just the scenery and none of the crowd. No matter how powerful Photoshop is, it can only do so much unless you provide it with best possible pictures for it to work with.
To properly remove all the tourists from your pictures, you will need to take a series of images from the exact same spot, with the exact same composition, at the exact same settings. You need to take enough pictures over a long enough amount of time so all the people in the frame would have moved from where they were standing and you can see every bit of the background in at least OVER HALF of the pictures you take. Photoshop will look at those pictures and see what pixels are the most common from all of the images. Photoshop will then take all those in common parts and stitch it all together into a clean image void of any people.
Tips and Settings
- Set your camera to Manual mode (M), You want your camera to have the exact same settings for all the pictures you take in the sequence.
- Use a Tripod – You want to keep your camera completely still. Because you are taking a sequence of pictures, you need to have them look identical, so don’t move that camera.
- Make sure you take enough pictures. Wait there long enough so all the people will shuffle about allowing you to get images of the background without people blocking it.
Step 1
Import the pictures into Adobe Lightroom and do any edits you want to them now. adjust the exposure, correct the white balance, crop the image, color correction, etc. Just make sure you Synchronize the edits to all the images you are going to use in your composite.
Step 2
With all the images you want to use selected, right click and select Edit In and select “Open As Layers In Photoshop…”
Step 3 If any of your images are a little out of alignment from the rest of your pictures, select all your layers and go to Edit –> Auto-Align Layers…
Step 4 Go to the Layers menu at the top of screen, and select Smart Objects, than select Convert To Smart Object
Step 5 Next go back to the Layers menu, this time select Smart Objects, than select Median and let Photoshop work it’s magic. You should come out with an image minus all the moving people.
Step 6 Once Photoshop is finished your pictures into a clean image free of any people, check for any anomalies or artifacts in the picture from the blending process. In the waterfall picture above, I had to remove little water droplets from the waterfall mist that landed on the lens using a layer mask, and masking in from a clean copy of one of the images before the mist landed on the lens. If for some reason you did not get a enough pictures to remove all the people from the image and get a clean background, you will have to clone stamp them out or use the healing brush to remove them. There was a person in the front of my image that I had to clone out. But I decided to leave the little person standing on the bridge to add a interesting human element to the image. 
Now you can travel to these popular destinations and come home with some pictures that are different than anybody else there. Use what you learned from this Photoshop Tutorial and use Photoshop to remove all the tourists from your pictures. Most people are happy with just a snapshot of the location, taken at high noon, with peoples crowding around blocking the view. But make your pictures stand out from all those snapshots by capturing something different, Something unique.
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