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Today's Deke's Techniques explains how to magically remove unwanted people from a photograph. Crazy as it may sound, you can take anything that moves in a scene---a person, a car, or even a distended orangutan head---and make it disappear into thin air. Suddenly a crowded plaza or distant vista becomes altogether vacant.

This technique requires two things: First, you'll need to shoot several exposures of the scene so that Photoshop can compare the stuff that moves to the stuff that doesn't. And second, you'll need Photoshop Extended. Either CS3, CS4, or CS5 will do just fine; but you have to own the Extended version of the software to pull this technique off.

Assuming you have both of these, the tool of choice is the image stack. Like a super-powered blend mode, an image stack takes a smart object-full of images and runs a kind of statistical analysis on every pixel across multiple images. Which is to say, it blends the similar pixels one way and the different ones another. So an image stack either wipes out or highlights differences.

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It's tempting to dismiss stitched panoramas as a kind of trendy fad, one that passed about the same time that Adobe finally got its act in gear with the current version of Photomerge. But I see panoramas very much in the realm of ongoing relevance, and for two reasons. First, the obvious: You can build an image with roughly the same proportions as human eyesight, thus permitting the viewer to fully immerse in your photograph. Second, and more importantly (because there's nothing that says these things have to be wide), you can assemble a higher number of pixels than your camera can otherwise capture. For example, a collection of 12-megapixel shots can grow upwards of 30 megapixels---even after cropping---enough to measure at least 3 feet wide (or 3 feet tall, if you prefer) at 267 pixels per inch.

Photoshop's Photomerge command is easy enough to use. But getting flawless results out of it is another thing. It's less a matter of Photoshop wizardry---there's not a whole lot you can do to control Photomerge's automated behavior---and more one of capturing the best scene while behind the camera. And because panoramas are best suited to grand vistas and other location shots, you may have just one chance to get it right. Which is what this video is ultimately about.

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Okay, so the crop tool isn't necessarily Photoshop's most exciting feature. But what in the hell would we do without it? This one tool lets you clip away the edges of a photograph so you can hone in on just those details that you want to keep. You can straighten an image that you inadvertently shot cock-eyed. And best of all, you can temporarily hide portions of an image (as opposed to forever clip them) so that you can restore the cropped areas and recompose the image five ways to Sunday.

Which is a lot of "featuricity" for one tool. As usual, I show you more than how the crop tool works. (Cropping couldn't be much more obvious.) Rather, I show you how to exploit the crop tool six ways to Tuesday. Which is the promise of Photoshop Top 40, after all. Read more »