P: Remove people using a merge-style operation

[thewils]

I'm a hobbyist who enjoys travelling and taking photos. I have a habit of taking more than one photo at a location where there are lots of people milling around. My idea is for LR/PS to use the backgrounds from selected photos (from the same viewpoint) to fill in areas where people are and thus remove them. The AI tools to remove people are already pretty good, but I think it would be fantastic if you could use several photos (similar to HDR processing) to fully recreate backgrounds that may be hidden in some photos but visible in others. I see the process as similar to HDR but instead of selecting "HDR" or "Panorama" there would be another option to remove people. Who knows where this could lead. It would be like AI analysing a scene from several photos instead of just the single one as is now to remove distractions.

[Conrad_C]

There are existing techniques to do this that don’t even require AI, and so they’ve been around for years. You wrote “LR/PS” so if you are willing to do this in Photoshop, do you already know about the stack modes that help with “tourist remover” techniques using multiple exposures? The 7-year-old video below is a demo of how to do that in Photoshop. If you also want to do this in Lightroom Classic, then that is something Adobe will need to add, so that part of this feature request is still a good idea.

[GoldingD]

Adobe could identify this as /Photo Merge/Common/

[thewils]

Thanks for the input and the link. I was vaguely aware that it was possible to paint out distractions manually using layers and masking but had forgotten about the smart object stack mode method. The example uses 9 separate photos which is more than I'd normally take from one spot. I'm sure it would work to some extent with fewer shots but it would be handy if the AI could cut it down to two or three as 10 photos on my camera costs me half a gig! Like I say, I'm only a hobbyist and often there isn't enough time to stand and wait around for other people to move.