It's best if you have a tweezer soldering tip iron so you can apply heat to both sides of the existing SMD caps at once. It makes them easy to remove and it also lessens the liklihood you will break a trace (which often occurs if you desolder one side, force it up, and then desolder the other side). Of course, a tweezer tip is a bit uncommon, so most people just go the el-cheapo route.

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The real el-cheapo route is to just use two soldering pencils. A grounded 15 watt soldering pencil is less than $10 at Radio Shack, so two of them will set folks back less than $20.

Get them both heated, and apply one to each end of the SM cap. Be gentle and patient and the cap will easily lift off with little to no danger of lifted traces.

This method of SM component removal was first posted (AFAIK and in the Mac world) on Marc Schrier's Clock Chipping Home Page, more than a decade ago, yet few people seem aware of it.

This also eliminates the easy-removal motivation to use radial caps instead of SM caps. However, the motivation because SM tantalums may have too wide terminals remains.