This Guy Photoshopped a Crane Out of a Building Photo as a Challenge

It’s amazing what can be done with Photoshop these days with simple techniques and a lot of patience. Case in point: UK-based photographer Denyer shared this 4-minute timelapse of an edit he did for fun, removing a large crane covering a busy building over 2-hours of retouching.

It all started when Denyer was chatting in the Reddit /r/photography IRC channel on Snoonet with Illinois-based photographer Paul Frederiksen.

Frederiksen had shared his crane photo, saying that he wasn’t happy with the shot because of the crane blocking the building.

“He wanted a shot of the sugar factory, but the crane had been parked there for months and wasn’t going anywhere,” Denyer tells PetaPixel. “I said I could Photoshop it out for him, but he laughed at me and said it was impossible. I took that as a challenge and went for it.”

Denyer opened up Photoshop and gave himself a two hour limit. Here’s the before-and-after comparison showing what he was able to do:

The original photo by Paul Frederiksen.
The edited photo after Denyer removed the crane with Photoshop.

Here’s a closer crop showing only the crane area:

A crop of the original photo by Paul Frederiksen.
The same cropped area of the edited photo after Denyer removed the crane with Photoshop.

Finally, here’s an animated GIF showing the edit:

“There were a few more bits to do, but I hit my self-imposed time limit so left it there,” Denyer says. “Nothing much to it beyond simple techniques really.”

“I couldn’t believe that he spent 2 hours on it as a challenge,” Frederiksen tells PetaPixel. “It would have been a throwaway photo otherwise […] Very impressed. I think I saw what he did the next day and about fell over.”

If you’d like to watch the actual 2-hour edit in real-time, Denyer uploaded that version of the video as well.


Image credits: Video and edit by Denyer, original photo by Paul Frederiksen, and used with the permission of the respective artists.

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