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December 6, 2006
Data Cleaning and the Art of Tourist Removal
There is something magnificently nifty and creepy about this article on removing tourists from your photos:Every notable landmark seems to have one thing in common: visitors, and lots of them. But if you want that postcard shot or that image that shows how the location may have once appeared, you have a challenge ahead of you. This digital photography and PhotoShop tutorial will provide a means to remove the tourist throngs from your vacation images.Taking it up a level, what is happening here is that tourists are just another kind of outlier digital data in a digital database, otherwise known as a photo. Like cleaning spurious data from traditional data sets, which has gone on forever, related ad hoc techniques are now appearing in the consumer imaging world. Fascinating.
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Well, in the brave old world of silver film, it was pretty simple to do this. Stop the lens right down, slow down the shutter speed, and take a time exposure (a tripod is recommended.) Since tourists don't stand still for very long, they don't show up in your photo.
Of course with point and shoot cameras, you'll have to resort to a Photoshop tutorial.