They're up to Neat projects 4 now -- if you like it & want to upgrade keep an eye on your emails from Franzis for usually decent pricing. Note: don't buy immediately when you get the email, since I've received 2-3 emails within 2 days with varying prices for the same app.

The way it works is you take a series of photos of the same thing. Neat projects puts them together, lines everything up, and removes anything moving by replacing a moving object or person with whatever's behind them using one of the other shots. FWIW, you can do the same thing in Photoshop, but it's not optimized to line everything up like Neat projects -- Franzis says you do not need to use a tripod.

Neat projects 2 Pro takes up just under 50MB, was given away roughly a year ago [might have been given away since], and is not optimized for higher rez monitors -- you'll want to go into the compatibility settings. You might also check for Windows updates after installing Neat projects 2 Pro -- these older Franzis apps install an older version of C/C++ runtimes from Microsoft that may have had security updates since. [I install them in a virtual machine, then copy the program's folder to a regular copy of Windows to avoid those runtimes entirely.] Note: some of these come with a wrapper from Franzis -- you copy / paste a key to proceed with installation -- & you can find the actual setup file in Users\ [UserName]\ AppData\ Local\ Temp\ if you want to save it for later use.

Franzis Projects software is always high quality. I have not tried this out yet because you have to plan to use it when taking the photos and I have not had that opportunity yet.

These are some samples of what I have used their software for.

http://the5thc.blogspot.com/search?q=franzis

Hi,

Can I get upgrade pricing for future upgrades?

I see on their website there is a Neat projects 4 Pro version.
I don't know how GOTD works in that respect.
I'm interested in the latest version, not now but maybe in six months or so.

Thanks!
NRL

Is this the first time they've given away the Pro version? Maybe. I already have it (not via GAotD) and don't use it much at all, but it's free and could be useful. The theory is quite simple, take a bunch of images of somewhere until you (hope you) have one showing every part of the scene without a person in front of it. Load the images into the program and it should make one without the people. Their examples show hand-held shooting.

IMHO worth the download if this might be something you'd like to play with.


P.S. To add raw image support for more recent (although not very recent) cameras, which is probably not worth the effort as you can play with JPEGs and even with the updated library it's still very out-of-date:

Usually the GAotD releases come with an old Raw file import library (e.g. from 2014) so straight-out-of-the-box won't support more recent cameras. However you can just copy a later version of FreeImage.dll over the one in the program's directory to help with that (although it's still not completely up-to-date).

Look in "C:\Users\johnl\Neat Projects 2 Pro" and see if it has an old version of FreeImage.dll, which is the library that decodes Raw images from your camera (you don't care if you only plan to use it with JPEGs). I replaced this with the newest version I have (once I've shut the program down so don't have a sharing error) which is:
FreeImage.dll - 6,924,800 bytes - 26-02-19
Alas usually you can download later versions from Franzis, but the downloads haven't been updated so you have to go to:
https://freeimage.sourceforge.io/download.html
and download the DLL (second link down the page)
Unzip the archive and choose the correct copy (x32/x64 - if you're running the 32-bit version of Windows your computer won't have a directory "C:\Program Files (x86)") of FreeImage.dll from FreeImage\Dist (which is 3.18.0.0, same as the one I used). I did install and test this exact file and it does work with supported cameras. You don't need the archive afterwards.

Note these are still not completely up-to-date, so recent cameras may not have Raw support and I just used JPEGs for my testing and was happy with avoiding all the Raw conversion time.
If you have a Mac you'll need to get the OSX version of FreeImage from SourceForge and replace the existing one, wherever it might be.

P.P.S. Oh and being fairly old (2018) note it's not high-DPI (i.e. 4k/5k monitor) friendly. So if you have one I'd recommend, on Windows 10 or 11, that you right mouse button the program, select Properties, then the Compatibility tab, click "Change high DPI settings", tick "Override high DPI scaling..." at the bottom of the next dialogue and select "System (Enhanced)", or if that doesn't work well then "System".