Tutorial 1

Dan Mold runs through three ways to remove people from landscapes in Photoshop Elements to achieve perfectly clean images of tourist hotspots

Discover three easy ways to remove people from your photographs

if you’re trying to achieve a postcard look with your landscapes then it’s a good idea to make sure the photo is free of pedestrians, so the viewer’s attention is focused solely on your focal point. But this is easier said than done, and whether you’re shooting the Eiffel Tower in Paris or Big Ben in London, you’re bound to get at least a few bystanders in shot. It’s even quite a task to get a clean shot of lesser known gems like Ogmore castle in Wales.

You could get up early to increase your chances of having the spot to yourself, or blur the people in the scene with a long exposure. However, that doesn’t help you if you’ve already taken the image. With that in mind I’m going to show you three different methods that you can use in Photoshop CC and Elements 2019. We’ll start with the easy to use and automated Spot Healing Brush tool, then move on to the Clone Stamp tool, which lets you take on more manual control and finish off with the Patch tool. This lets you replace a large chunk of ‘bad’ pixels from your scene with a good selection from the surrounding image – it’s then blended in and Photoshop usually does an impressive job!

If you’ve got a suitable image just load it up, but if you don’t and would like to try out the technique you can download our Ogmore. JPEG start image through the download link (bottom left).

Ready to remove some people? Follow along with the accompanying video, or the step by step guide, to see how.