I want to get photos of city streets with no cars in them. I once saw a tutorial showing how you can give photoshop a series of photos of a scene taken at different times (so the cars/people are in different places in each one) and photoshop will automatically combine them to eliminate anything that moved scene-to-scene, leaving a clean background.

I know how I could do it manually, but I want to be able to do this to lots of pictures, so PS's automatic way would be very nice. I've tried searching for it a lot, but can't find anything like it.

Thanks for any help!

The other way of getting rid of people etc is to do really long exposures with a very strong neutral density filter. Means a long time between shots though, and does not work if people are standing about, but will get rid of the occasional walker.

you can use a tool in photoshop called statistics. I know it is in CS4 under File -> scripts. I don't think I had it in my CS3 menu as there were several variations of CS3. There are different stacking methods, I am not sure which one to do....


take a look here:
http://www.creativetechs.com/iq/photosh ... mover.html

Heres another one, although not really automatic:

Another method and perhaps a bit more automated...similar to Andrews...
I have also used this to remove falling snow from images as well. Take 3-5 images minimum for best results...

Open P/S... I am using CS5 but this works back to CS4 and I think CS3 can't remember....
Go to File-Automate-Photomerge
Browse for your files (or if you already have them open click Add Open Files Button)
Select AUTO align under Layout
UNCHECK Auto-blend Images (you use this if your doing panorama's)
Click OK and let it do its thing...

You will get an image open with a layer for each image.. most of your "people/cars" will be gone...
Then use the steps in Andrews to mask out the rest...
tweak it with a quick crop or content aware fill away the transparent checkerboard areas

Gary

Hi Matt,

what you want is super easy to achieve if you shoot enough photos:
-go to File->Scripts->Statistics and set the stack mode to median
-select your images, check automatically allign images
-voilà!

Best Regards
David

Hi,

this is quite interesting as I had some similar thoughts a while ago and for me Photoshop did not work well. It is just not optimized to compose hundreds of images in an efficient way.

This image was shot from the Getty museum in LA. About 100 shots in 10 minutes (that is when the guards told me that tripods are not allowed on the premises)

That is when I actually got into doing some programming and wrote a tool to do this composites. You can check it out on my website http://web.me.com/karstenreuter/Crowded_Places/Crowded_Places.html and it is available on the Mac App Store.

Karsten