Corporate photographers and commercial photographers often produce pictures of buildings, factories and retail locations.
Customers will sometimes request the digital removal of objects such as poles, road signs, overhead wires, fire hydrants, bus stops, etc., from exterior photos.
What’s funny about such requests is the customer assumes that once an object is erased, whatever was behind that object will automatically become visible. But as every photographer knows, when something is digitally removed from a photo, it just leaves a blank spot in the picture.
This blank spot somehow has to be filled with whatever was behind the erased object. If you’re lucky, this can be relatively easy to do, especially if the background is a plain wall, grass, pavement or empty sky.
With a busy background, filling in a blank spot can be very complicated and time-consuming. You may have to manually draw what was behind the removed object. You might also have to take some artistic licence and fill the blank spot with something that looks normal but isn’t necessarily accurate, (e.g. adding extra bushes, more tree branches, extending the pavement).
Parallax Power
If you know ahead of time that you’ll be removing objects from a scene with a busy background, you can take advantage of parallax when shooting the pictures:
1. Take a few similar pictures from slightly different angles. Often just two frames are enough but it depends on the number objects to be removed and their relative positions.
2. Accurately stack the images in Photoshop and use layer masks to blend the images together. Generally you mask out the objects you want to remove and you mask in the background behind each of those objects.
The benefit of this method is that accurate and complex details can be made visible with minimal cloning and painting required.
Not the prettiest example:
In the final photo, the pole has disappeared and accurate building details have been restored to the photo.
