In other words, if you see someone pointing a camera on a tripod towards a monument with a crowd of tourists (that you are a member of), try to stand perfectly still.
I thought it was going to be physically. Like “pass gas and then once it clears out take your photo.” This is more effective and reliable.
This is useful. I use Photoshop every day and didn’t know this. I just tried it by shooting 6 shots of my interior with me posing in a different spot for each photo and ran it through the Photoshop process and it looks good, but there’s ghosts of myself, so you definitely need more than 6 shots, probably like 15.
But what if we only want the tourists?
Sounds like you don’t want the median, you want the mode. Does Photoshop do that? If it did, it would remove moving people with very few pictures.
It’s an interesting idea, but am I the only one that thinks touristy locations without people are kind of creepy? Like city streets with no people, it just feels dystopian.
The only thing worse than a city without people is a city with people.
People without a city?
Imagine thousands of businessmen and women with suitcases, talking to their phones in the middle of a vast prairie, no signs of civilization anywhere.
You can use a similar trick to eliminate scaffolding poles / lampposts from in front of a subject - take a number of pictures from say 15ft away, moving sideways between each one so different parts of the subject are obscured each time, then process the images together.
Long ago I went to a Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit with some friends. The night before we were drinking a bit of beer, though one friend had quite a bit more beer, ate a jar of garlic stuffed olives, and ate few hotdogs with a lot of sauerkraut. The exhibit was really busy except for wherever he went, though it was unbearable to follow him around.
Indeed. And that’s why I live outside an itty-bitty town no one has heard of. I can go days without seeing anyone who doesn’t actually live in my house. 
Is that a photo of Lindos in Rhodes? Looks familiar.
Strictly speaking, the mode wouldn’t be well-defined in a signal any noise to speak of (in that no two images would have exactly the same value for a given pixel) which is what I’d expect.
Yes, but you can easily code for that. If you have four pictures and three have a carved stone colored pixel with slight variability and one has a red shirt colored pixel, it’s pretty easy to tell which one to throw away when making the output picture.
Maybe I should just try making a program that does it this way and see how well it works.
Tried my phone’s removal function – wasn’t a good test since my wife was moving the car forward as I was collecting the pics…
It did remove pedestrians from the crosswalk, but it also caused a" transporter error" where one fellow was merged with a jeep and another jeep didn’t get stitched back together well over in the sidewalk area.
Edit: I wonder if the problems with the Jeeps arose because they were also rolling forward?
I can get OCD about extracting humans from photos of things, but realized I had to let it go. Sometimes it’s interesting to have the crowds milling around the frame.
In the future the procedure will be to speak the words “remove people”, and hope for the best.
I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave.
