
In most cases, you will need between 8 to 25 photos. You want to give people and cars enough time to move. When you take your photos, wait about 20 seconds or so in between each shot. I wanted to use photos that were less than perfect so that you could see the power of this technique. The pictures that we will be using in this tutorial were shot by hand with a mobile phone.

However, if you do not have a tripod, hold your camera as steady as possible when shooting your images and you will still get great results. Ideally, you should take your photos on a tripod so that the images line up better during the blend. The tricky part is to get the right photos for this Stack Mode to work. Thus, you can remove people and unwanted traffic when the algorithm is applied, leaving only the background. It is very likely that cars and people will move and change locations from one shot to the next. It will keep identical areas and remove everything that changes between the different shots. One of those Stack Modes is Median, which takes a statistical average of the content found in all the photos in the stack. The Image Stack Modes are sort of like a Blending Mode that blends layers inside of a Smart Object in a certain way depending on the algorithm that you select. Photoshop has this little-known feature that has been around for over a decade called Image Stack Modes.

You do need to plan ahead and take multiple photos, but the results will be amazing! In this Photoshop tutorial, you will learn a technique that will allow you to quickly remove people and cars from your photos. It can be very distractive, and they take away from the real subject. The worst part about taking photos of monuments and city streets is that you always get cars and people blocking the architecture behind them.
