I do real estate photography for construction companies that build or renovate homes in the greater Toronto area. Often I photograph a home before construction has begun and then return weeks or months later to picture the finished work.
The photos are intended to highlight the construction company’s work on the house so they don’t want any unsightly distractions. It’s often necessary to remove objects such as vehicles, garbage bins, construction materials, overhead wires, hydro poles, etc.
Photoshop usually comes to the rescue when it’s not possible to move an object before the pictures are taken. But Photoshop’s various tools don’t work well with complex backgrounds. In these cases, an old-school technique might come in handy.
The decades-old parallax trick can sometimes be used to remove an object and show what was behind it.
I photographed this house from several angles to specifically capture what was behind the car. The pictures were combined in Photoshop to remove the vehicle and reveal the hidden portion of the house. Parallax won’t work for areas under an object so the Clone tool was used to fill in the area under the car.
The two examples above weren’t too complicated and other methods could have been used to get the same results. But parallax is usually the best way to eliminate objects in front of very complex backgrounds.
Eliminate Moving Objects
If you’re trying to photograph a building that has a continual flow of cars or people in front of it, the parallax trick won’t work. Parallax is only for stationary objects.
There are two similar methods to eliminate moving objects from a picture of a stationary object like a building:
1) Shoot a number of pictures of your scene, ideally with a tripod, over the course of several minutes. Create an aligned layer stack with your images in Photoshop. Use layer masks to manually hide the moving objects.
(2) Use a tripod and shoot a number of pictures of your scene over the course of several minutes. Use the Statistics Median stack script in Photoshop (File > Scripts > Statistics) to automatically eliminate the moving objects. This method may not work well if you have moving tree branches, moving clouds, flowing water, fluttering flags, etc,. but you can use additional layer masks to fix these.
