I think there are way too many variables to suggest a specific course of action. It would be much better if you could attach one of the actual photos, but only if you're comfortable sharing it here. You could block out any faces or words first if that might help

here is a downsized sample where you can see the shadows

people were taking phone pics and they all got shadows too

I'm sure if PIX were still here he'd have some quick and helpful advice, but what I can suggest is to use the Guided | Background Removal tool and get rid of the entire background like this:



You'll need to take the tool out of Intelligent mode and zoom in to maybe 300% to deal with difficult areas, like the white jacket near the shoulder of the person on the right and the dark area around the right hand of the person on the left, but it only took me a couple minutes to do the above work.

The best possible solution would be if you happened to have a full pic of the empty background as you could then simply add that in as a background layer and be done. I've attached the pic as well so you can work with it directly.

There are plenty of tutorials here on the forum and on YouTube if you need help on the finer details of the background removal tool or working with layers. I hope what I've posted here will get you started down the right path!

thanks for the info. Yes removing the whole background can be good but time consuming if you have over 50 pics; that is the problem
I agree that if it is only a few, it could be worth doing

If I used flash, there would have been zero shadows but my equipment fell and the flash and a lens broker earlier that night
I had taken some flash pics much earlier that turned out nice and no shadows in the same spot with the same circular light there. It seems like there is no way around the shadows in this scenario without using a flash to take the pics

Quote I'm sure if PIX were still here he'd have some quick and helpful advice, but what I can suggest is to use the Guided | Background Removal tool and get rid of the entire background like this:



You'll need to take the tool out of Intelligent mode and zoom in to maybe 300% to deal with difficult areas, like the white jacket near the shoulder of the person on the right and the dark area around the right hand of the person on the left, but it only took me a couple minutes to do the above work.

The best possible solution would be if you happened to have a full pic of the empty background as you could then simply add that in as a background layer and be done. I've attached the pic as well so you can work with it directly.

There are plenty of tutorials here on the forum and on YouTube if you need help on the finer details of the background removal tool or working with layers. I hope what I've posted here will get you started down the right path!

also, if I do remove the backgrounds on 50 images for example, can I change to the new background as batch and do all at the same time and export ?

It's not exactly a batch process, but you simply define a single background photo and then add each of you desired pics on top and save each one.

You can definitely export all the photos at once as shown in this other online help page. It's probably a little quicker if you have all the photos in a single folder.