There is a free online application that removes tourists from your digital photos while leaving the scenery intact. Yeah, like the neutron bomb, only less radioactive.

The very expensive Photoshop CS3 has a similar “People Remover” function, but since I’m a budget, I was very happy to find SnapMania.

Sign up for a free account at SnapMania.com and get the following online goodies:

Edit and enhance your pix
100 MB photo storage online
Create web albums, photobooks and slideshows
Order prints of your digital pix
Personalize mugs, mousepads, t-shirts, etc.
Use Tourist Remover
Share collections

The instructional video is a must-see for those who are not sufficiently intuitive or who want to get right down to business. You can pay for storage upgrades if you really get into SnapMania’s all-Flash photo editing and archiving services.

Now for a Tourist Remover demo…

There are several means to upload digital pictures or zipped files, which will automatically decompress into your account. Open the new picture collection and select the raw material, which must be at least 3 pictures.

Choose “Remove Tourists” on the bottom of the page, and then drag and drop to arrange your pictures from left-to-right with best approximation of the final desired picture on the left. Here are the three I used for this example:

Snap 1

Take 2

Move, already!

Choose the quality of the resulting picture. The better the quality, the longer it will take – but don’t worry about it. In several trial runs, the results never took longer than one minute to complete!

Click “Create,” and the program will tell you that your job is in a queue with about 679 jobs before yours. I suspect that’s a bogus number, because I get it every time I use the program. When the results are ready, you will receive an email notification. Again, in about a minute’s time.

Zap!

Pretty cool, eh? If you get some ghosting or double imaging, as you see in this sample, you can tweak the exposure/contrast/saturation or choose different pictures or change the order, and then try again. Best results come when the removable objects do not overlap between pictures, and if the pictures were shot from the exact same point of view (use a tripod if you can).

This program “removes tourists and other interfering objects.” Think of the possibilities. Remove chain link fencing, passing cars, pigeons, telephone lines, clouds, UFO’s, etc.

There’s one weird aspect to this site in that it seems to have no “Home” link, so you always have to navigate back to “http://my.snapmania.com/” by yourself. But that’s nothing. Open a free account and play with the toys.

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