Removing someone from a photo is a common retouching request for wedding, family, graduation, and business pictures. While re-shooting the photo may be the better option, it’s not always possible. In those cases, retouching becomes the only solution.
The two men could have been removed simply by cropping the photo. But if the full width of the image is to be retained, retouching is required. Fortunately the men are at the outside of the group and they overlap behind the women. The complicated background on the right side made retouching more complex.
The success of removing someone from a photo depends on how much that person overlaps with others and how complex the background is.
The person to be removed is in the centre of the group and she overlaps in front of the other people. Luckily the overlap is small. A plain background makes it easy to move people around.
The person to be removed is in the centre, there’s virtually no overlap, and the plain background is a single tone. This type of photo makes it easy to remove a person. However the odd pose of the woman on the second-right means she’s missing an arm in the retouched photo. Hopefully this isn’t noticeable.
The person to be removed has almost no overlap and the background is plain. The desk has a complicated surface but the out-of-focus documents can be somewhat recreated. Failing that, the surface of the desk could have been changed to plain white.
The people to be removed have minimal overlap with the woman in the centre and the background is very out-of-focus and easy to recreate. Luckily, her right shoulder and arm are fully visible and that was used to recreate her left shoulder and arm.
When an object is removed from a photo, it has to be replaced with something. Artistic licence is often taken because the retoucher has no idea what was behind the removed object. But as long as the replacement looks plausible, the results should look good.
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Removing Someone From A Photo
