How to remove a house from a photo

Al Hart

From a client:

I have a photograph of an existing house that we took with a camera. I drew a house with sketchup that I need to insert onto the site photo, and I need to remove the existing house from the photo. Is this something you can help me with?

solo

Al

This can be an interesting thread as I too have had to do this and never really pulled it off very well, I believe folk like Sean (Underdog) is needed here as he has superhuman Photo-shop skills.

I'll be watching this for any tip I can get.

xrok1

i could imagine if you roughly photo match the site, modelling a ground plane and most of the dominant features then place your SU house in to that, the result could be quite good. depending on how much time you spend and the viewing angle of course.

thomthom

Would help to see the photo. What to do depends on the content.

I do this kind of thing all the time - I mostly use Photoshop's Clone and Healing brush. Occationally I mix-in with other images from the site. (or if that is lacking, from other sites if it match. )

Chris Fullmer

Exactly, this is what I do with much of my time. And it often depends on the base image for how easy or difficult it will be to remove the house. But its a lot of fun doing it!

massimo

Photoshop Cs5 is quite a nice tool. A 5 sec work. Just made a rough selection then pressed canc. Obviously you can complete better the job with some additional work.

solo

Whoah!! that CS5 has some cool stuff.

massimo

Indeed Solo.

wyatt

Yeah, the content aware fill in CS5 is such a great tool. Sometimes it requires a few iterations to get it to look right, but it's a tremendous time saver compared to the clone method. I've heard Gimp has something similar, though I've not used it.

thomthom

@solo said:

Whoah!! that CS5 has some cool stuff.

Yea - we finally got it at work. It's great at doing the bulk work. Quite impressive how often it does it right.

Aerilius

@unknownuser said:

I've heard Gimp has something similar, though I've not used it.

Adobe sells it as innovation, but Gimp has that feature since 2005.

As you see, the result is not equal (CS5's tool is more intelligent), but for landscapes the difference is not noticeable. So if you want to use it but don't have CS5, you can just install gimp-resynthesizer (or http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer)

Al Hart

@massimo said:

Photoshop Cs5 is quite a nice tool. A 5 sec work. Just made a rough selection then pressed canc. Obviously you can complete better the job with some additional work.

Wow!

Are you telling me that CS made the third image from the 1st image all on its own?

Chris Fullmer

Yes! <in summary> It has to be the newest CS5. And GiMP has had it for a few years, though possibly not quite as clean as the expensive photoshop version.

And all previous versions of Photoshop had tools that let you do it manually very quickly (again, depending on the photo - some are rather time consuming to fix).

But still, that CS5 example above is very impressive! I hope some day my office decides to upgrade. I have a feeling we'll be skipping 5 altogether though

Chris

massimo

@unknownuser said:

Wow!

Are you telling me that CS made the third image from the 1st image all on its own?

Exactly Al, just what I said: a lasso selection and canc. That's all.
Obviously the result depends on the base image and often you need some additional work.
Here you have another example made with the "spot healing brush tool": paint on the objects you want to remove, then release the left button of the mouse...

dylan

Amazing tools. Maybe I should upgrade my CS4!

bmike

Where in GIMP?

I'm running 2.6 (just downloaded a few weeks ago).
Can't seem to find it!

Aerilius

It is a plugin "gimp-resynthesizer". You can download it here: http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer

notareal

This technique was represented in SIGGRAPH some years ago. There is also another image operator called seam carving that supports content-aware image resizing (CS4 and greater).

dale

You can also remove an image in PS Elements with the "magic extractor", but I think you will have to fill the space manually with clone tool etc.
The Gimp plugin is windows only, or used to be anyway.

Aerilius

The Gimp plugin supports many platforms. The easiest installation is in Linux, Windows is a bit more to do by hand and the site offers also a download for OS X:
http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer/history