image compositing to remove telephone wires?

Question

There's a lot of compositing software available. Is there any that can remove telephone wires from a still image?

The idea is to shoot still images the same scene from several different vertical positions. That will produce a sequence of images in which the wires are in different places with respect to the scene behind them. Theoretically, there's enough image information there to reconstruct the scene with the wires gone.

Any ideas about how to combine several images this way? Are there any automated tools for this? Are there any good ways to use Photoshop with multiple images, cloning one onto the other?

Answer 1

If the background is sky, or is lighter than the wires, then stack your multiple images, align them and then for each wire you want to remove:

• with the image with the wire below and image without the wire above
• set layer blend mode to "lighten"
• that will show the top layer's lighter pixels in place of the wire
• mask as necessary

It may be tricky to align the layers in Photoshop, since the automatic alignment will no doubt use the wires as contrasty object to align, which you don't want, and each layer will have slight perspective changes.

The healing brush, using the content aware option, will remove wires pretty effectively from a single image. Might be worth a try before resorting to multiple images.

Here's a contrived example. Two copies of the same image, so perfectly aligned, with "wires" added in at different levels.

I layered the two images, and set the top blending mode to "Lighten" and the wire disappears. This could be done with simple masking, but this method avoids masking altogether if the background is consistently lighter than the wires.

Answer 2

If the wire is totally separate without any other element (like a perched bird) or mingled with something else (like a tree), simplest way is to do a clone-stamp... This applies to any unwanted object (rather pixels) present in the screen. However if the wire separates a contrasting element, this would be very time consuming process, but if you want such thing, then time is ok... Also works for situations where you have just a single image (past) or cannot take another angle (present/future).

For future shots, if possible, use a wide aperture and focus on somewhere in the building etc, so that wires get a natural defocus.. But for typical landscape shots, the aperture is quite narrow which prevents this..