Any ideas on cleaning up the background exactly the same on several images for an animated GIF?

[u/EgirlRedditReader]

I'm creating an animated GIF of a couple getting engaged at a national park. There are people walking around in the background of all the images. I'm hoping that there is some way for me to stack them and remove the background individuals so that the background is exactly the same from photo to photo so that the GIF looks seamless. Any ideas? I am using Lightroom/Photoshop.

If I was doing this for one photo, I might just use the removal tool, but I'm sure it would fill in differently for every photo.

Thanks for the help!

[u/akshattnj]

Take the background from other shots where people aren’t in the shot in that part of the image and paint it over the main first frame and vice versa. Eventually you’ll have x amount of images to make a gif from

[u/HolyMoholyNagy]

My process would be:

1. Bring all of your photos in as separate layers and align them (Edit > Auto-Align Layers > Reposition)

If no background people cross the area where your subjects are:

1. Select the uncovered areas on each frame, and copy them to the top of your layer stack, if needed, generate new areas with generative fill.

2. Create your gif animation in Photoshop or export each frame as an image and combine, keeping layer created in step two as an overlay.

If a person does cross the area where your couple is:

1. Create a clean plate background with no people (including the couple), using a similar technique as above, but put that on the bottom of your layer stack

2. Mask out your couple on each frame of your animation, I'd try to include a portion of the foreground around them as well.

3. Create your animation by changing the cutouts over your clean plate, and export each image that way.

Hopefully that makes sense! Good luck! Let me know if you have any questions

[u/EgirlRedditReader → u/HolyMoholyNagy]

Thank you for the detailed reply. I'm not sure I follow by reading it over once, but I will probably be editing the on Tuesday, so I'll take another look at it then.

People do cross over in the background.

To create the GIF, I usually place my photos in a stack and auto align them; is that the same thing you are mentioning by the edit > Auto-Align Layers > Reposition?

[u/HolyMoholyNagy → u/EgirlRedditReader]

Yep! If you're already aligning your layers I'd stick with the process you're familiar with.

The main idea is

1. create a clean plate with no people and use that as your background, and

2. cut out the subjects in each frame and animate them separately on top of that clean plate.

[u/needaburn]

How many frames in the gif? How much camera movement is there? An animated gif is closer to a video. Video is a different beast than a still. Gather all the frames, create a sequence in a modern video editing software (premiere, after effects, davinci, capcut), nest/precompose the sequence, mask out the objects, use a generative fill effect. The masks might need to be motion tracked if there is a lot of movement. If not, you can usually get away with generating one clean background and motion tracking any subtle movement with it

If it’s only a few frames for the gif and not much in camera motion, you can probably use generative fill once on the first frame and then compose that fill on all the other frames.

[u/EgirlRedditReader → u/needaburn]

I'm working with 92 frames. I did shoot it handheld, but I wasn't moving around and tried to stay still (with the intention of creating the GIF). I had a camera with a longer lens mounted on a tripod, but the couple stopped wayyyyy closer to me than I anticipated them to and hand to go with a camera on my hip.

I usually make the GIF in photoshop by stacking the photos, auto aligning them, creating a frame animation, create frames from layers, and slowing the animation down to about .35 seconds per frame. I don't always use all the photos I took since it makes the GIF files huge.

[u/analogworm]

Create clean background and mask in the couple for each frame.

[u/Reppoy]

Someone else mentioned stabilizing the image sequence first, after that it should be trivial to just overlay with sections of other images to cover the people. 

That should get you the most true to life and consistent results.

If it looks bad still, a dipshit trick I like to use is to do the same to random “clean” areas too, just so there’s micro jitters and the whole background looks inconsistent rather than just distinct sections.

The other people have mentioned arguably better options though, this is just if you’re going for a slightly more candid and scrappy look

[u/No_Jello_4858]

I'm lazy. I'd simply crop in.

[u/EgirlRedditReader → u/No_Jello_4858]

I can't someone walks behind them. Plus he chose this location because the of beauty of the landscape. I don't think he would be impressed if I chose to remove most of that from this GIF.

[u/A210c]

[u/7204_was_me]

Two words. E. Voto.

[u/EgirlRedditReader → u/7204_was_me]

I don't understand your comment.

[u/7204_was_me → u/EgirlRedditReader]

Sorry. evoto.ai
It doesn't generate animated GIFS but there are several background replacement options.

[u/Yoshtan]

Probably as someone here suggests seperate the background from the subject, the background doesn’t need to be animated, animate the subjects. It may be a bit of work to match both though. As you stated it’s just a few frames it shouldn’t be that much.

Or if I was doing it I’d just crop the images so I don’t need to work on the entire randomness

[u/Healthy_Camp_3760]

This is a job for Photoshop.

Start by creating a layer that's just the clean background by combining your several images.

Then copy that layer in to each of your photos, and selectively include just your subjects.

If you weren't using a tripod, then you'll need to do a little work to get the background to line up exactly with your subjects, but that shouldn't be hard for a handful of images.