I have here an example of a photo restoration, (removing a person) that if not correctly restored a simple brightness adjustment would reveal some very shoddy work indeed, I will explain.
Removing people from a photo
Lets have a look at this photo of some handsome college chaps on a night out with their partners. A request was made to remove the girls from the background which could be easy if it weren’t for the a hand on a shoulder and filling of the huge gap left behind.
There are two ways to go about this, the quick way and the right way. The quick way would be to select the girls with the selection tools and careful selection. Then simply clone over the girls with a large soft clone brush and rebuilding the pink shirt where the hand was.
Here is the image lightened a great deal to show the background detail.
Background enhanced to see details before removal of people
Cloning in this manner creates repeat patterns where the clone brush has just laid down the same texture and detail each time creating an unconvincing background.
The incorrect way to clone out the people
The right way would be to select and clone over but then make sure the background details were consistent with the image by following on the trees and the rocks behind the boys. I would not be able to sleep knowing that an image had been butchered in this manner.
Here is the image with corrected background detail and the top section of shadows lightened.
The correct way to clone out people
Now you know when your restoration is received and it looks like that “the people have been removed”. Think a bit more about what has gone on to achieve what you asked. I am sure that you will now begin to appreciate just how much is involved when a request is made to “remove those people”.
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Yes this is another way around the problem when you have absolutely nothing to go on. It’s actually very rare. When there are such large areas to cover, say when removing one person out of a photo when there is only two to start with, a more sensible option would be to crop the photo, as the empty portion would not be needed anyway.
One niggling thought is what to do if you really don’t have anything to go on to replace the chasm left by the figures. Cloning the surroundings, nomatter how well it’s done, still ends up repeating the background. If you’re looking at a complex background do you ever consider sampling areas of texture from other photographs?
Many thanks for your comments, this was a photo restoration from Middlesex UK, I would put this into the category of “removing people from a photo” which is quite a popular request!
Nice and simple tutorial…great work 🙂