Removing Tourists from Your Travel Photos

There have been many vacations in my past (with the exception of Romania and Tajikistan) where I was bummed out by the amount of tourists crawling all over the walls, floors, and big toe of some famous marble statue. Trying to a take a decent photo becomes depressing and so I usually give into capturing the moment with all the tiny little speckles I call human beings dotting the shot. And if you’re anything like me, you let out a huge sigh and mumble under your breath how you wish they’d all go away, but you must also remind yourself that someone else under the giant Buddha is also wishing they could erase you too. It almost sounds like a game doesn’t it?

Eliminating other obnoxious, gawking, tourists from your photo after the fact can be difficult, but is not impossible. The first thing one must try to do is take the picture with as few people as possible. Then comes the fun part – making them all vanish! The first tip as found on the dsphotographic.com site is to use a tripod. (This is assuming you are starting from scratch.) After you’ve got some photos to play with you’ll need to take them into Photoshop and from this point you’ll need to check out the tutorial because it gets very detailed from here. Overall the tourist removal sounds like it could be well worth the effort in the end, but it will involve some amount of work.