Remove people from photos

A photo‑editing technique that, by blending multiple shots, allows you to remove crowds, people, or other distracting elements from your images.

When shooting in a city, it’s very common to find people right in the middle of your frame, especially in tourist hotspots where it’s almost impossible to get a clean shot with no human subjects. Let’s take a look at how to remove crowds from your photos.

When photographing historical monuments or other busy locations, there will almost always be people or cars blocking part of the scene. There are several ways to remove unwanted elements from a photo, including AI‑powered tools, but if you want full control over the final result, manual editing is often the better choice.

If the subject is small or covering an unimportant area, the clone/heal tool in your favorite editing software may be enough - we’ll discuss this later on. But if there are many people or they’re covering key parts of the scene, removing them with the clone tool becomes difficult, as some background details may be unique and impossible to replicate.

Using the clone tool can also be frustrating in images with strong perspective, where the size of symmetrical objects changes with distance. With the technique described on this page, you can use two or more photos to remove moving people or cars, creating a clean, crowd‑free composition like in the example below.

To avoid ending up with photos that have different exposures, it’s best to shoot in manual mode. For the editing process we used GIMP, a free and open‑source program, but any software that supports selections will work.

How to Proceed

Let’s walk through the process. The key idea is that people are almost always moving, and the position of distracting elements changes over time.

Set your camera on a tripod or, if necessary, rest it on a wall or stable surface. If your camera allows manual control of exposure settings, adjust them so your shots are as consistent as possible.

Take the first photo, paying close attention to the areas blocked by people, highlighted in red below.

When people move and the previously hidden areas become visible, take a second shot. Try to be patient: the better you plan your shooting phase, the less editing you’ll need later.

Repeat the process until every portion of the scene that can’t be cloned is captured without any obstructions. In our case, three photos were enough.

Choose one image to serve as the base layer and identify the areas that need replacing. Using the other photos, find the moments where those areas are free of people, cut them out, and paste them onto the base image. If necessary, adjust brightness so all shots match.

There are several ways to achieve this. As mentioned earlier, the Clone/Stamp tool is probably the best all‑around solution, and we cover it in more detail on this page. It’s also essential for small touch‑ups. Alternatively, you can work with selections and layers, copying and pasting the needed portions.

You can stack the shots as layers, use the clone tool, open them in separate windows and copy/paste the method doesn’t matter, as long as the concept is clear.

As you can see, with a bit of luck and a relatively small number of people passing by, it’s possible to achieve a very satisfying result with minimal effort. Of course, if you’re in Venice this technique may be a bit more challenging, but with patience and good timing you can still bring home excellent results.

Always remember that a good photographer generally waits for the right moment to take the shot — this technique should be used only when it’s truly the only viable option.

If you liked this tutorial here you can find all the tutorials we wrote about editing with Gimp, or you can all the guides we have written about photography in general. If you liked our work, you could consider to ❤support us by clicking here you can see how.