Easier today.

When Comrade Stalin was busy whacking anything that moved, one of his victims was Nikolai Yezov, head of the NKVD secret police, which became the KGB, which became the FSB, with will become something else under the next Soviet psychopath/dictator.

One unfortunate unintended consequence of Comrade Yezov’s whacking – he headed the NKVD 1936-38 and got his in 1940 after falling out with Uncle Joe – was that all those danged encyclopedias proclaiming the might of the People’s State had to be rewritten, the pictures therein edited. And Stalin’s lads did a fabulous job before the days of Photoshop and digital technologies. Here’s the famous ‘canal’ picture of Stalin with Yezov, still in favor and looking Hollywood evil, walking by a canal. Then, once Comrade Y met his end at the barrel of a Belgian Nagant revolver, (designed for silence, so those in the cell next door remained unsuspecting), it was time for some serious retouching. Here’s the Before and After, courtesy of hundreds of man hours of some poor schlub in the basement of the Lubyanka Gaol. Doubtless he had an appointment with the aforesaid Nagant shortly after completing his work:

Yezov gone – original Soviet photographs.

Building on the astonishing capabilities of the AI Remove function in Lightroom Classic I decided to see what I could do to Comrade Y in LRc. After about thirty seconds of effort, no subsequent meeting with a bullet required, I came up with this. I have removed Yezov from the original Soviet image at left and it took …. all of 30 seconds:

The LRc version is at left.

Not only did it take a couple of weeks less than Comradeski Photoshopski devoted to the task, the result – check the water – is better. So, considering the ethics of the matter, the dictators of the world will revel in the capabilities of AI Remove whenever they have to rewrite the history books.

All in all, I rather prefer this version. Notice that AI has conferred a claw like right hand on the murderous Yezov, which seems entirely appropriate:

No Uncle Joe.

On a more practical note I decide to see what AI Remove could do to my snap of the wrapped ‘Christo building’ downtown, and here is the truly stunning result:

Click the image for a larger version.

I made some 11 passes with AI remove and the cars, the intrusive building at left and the street signs are all gone. I took it in small bites to let AI ‘learn’ the surroundings. Comrade Stalin would be proud.

Effective and fast.

Lightroom Classic has added an AI powered object removal capability. It’s superior to Content Aware Fill in Photoshop or Affinity Photo 2. The latter two frequently get confused when an object is closely bounded by others, wrongly duplicating the bounding objects and generally doing a poor job. LRc is superior in this regard.

Here is where to find it in the Develop module:

The AI Remove panel in LRc.

I am busy documenting fall in my community but the lovely fall colors in the streets are frequently disrupted by the presence of parked cars. Case in point:

The scene as photographed.

After applying LRc’s AI object removal.
Click the image for a larger version.

In the enlarged version you can clearly see that the car peeking out between the tree trunks has been removed perfectly.

Impressive technology. LRc 15.4.1. You must have an internet connection for this technology to work.

Leica SL2-S, 20-200mm Sigma at f/5.4 and ISO 100.