A big hi to my fellow Photoshop freaks. Today we're back in the darkroom so please excuse any accidental inappropriate touching … or perhaps that should be re-touching.
Ooooh, Paris!We are back on top of l'Arc de Triomphe, the site of our very first Teeny Tiny post.
This time, we are going to make this widescreen panorama …
(DO click on these for a decent view)
… from this …
… and this!Yay!
In olden days, stitching photos together to make a panorama was a royal pain in the ass. These days even iPhone cameras can do it for you automatically, but if you want high quality images you can print out, Photoshop is still the place to go.
You can stitch any number of photos together but for today's exercise I am just using two.
I've copied the two images I want to join together into a new Photoshop document and slid one across so that you can see that one is sitting on top of the other.
The little sidebar over on the right shows that each one is on a separate layer.At the top of the little sidebar's "Layers" section is an "Opacity" slider.
Here I've turned the top photo down to around 50% opacity so you can see through it to the bottom photo. This is not part of the process, simply a way to to demonstrate just how appallingly out of line the two images are; a common hazard when taking panoramic views without a tripod.
Anyhoo … Back to the sidebar and the "Layers" doohickey …Hold down 'shift' and select both photo layers so they show blue like this.
Then whiz across to the drop down "Edit" menu and select "Auto-Align Layers."Please note that this feature only came in with CS3, so if you still have an earlier version you can slap me.
Selecting this brings up another little doohickey with some choices for stitching photos together. I've chosen "Perspective" for obvious reasons.
Click "OK" and you get this. Pretty much what you would get if you were overlaying the images the old-fashioned way. You'll notice we can still see the edges of the photos where they overlap.Let's get rid of that, shall we?
Back to the "Edit" menu and this time we select "Auto-Blend Layers."
Woohoo! Now we're talking!
Rotate your finished image and crop it and then tidy up any final little aberrations with the clone tool or the healing tool, adjust the contrast to suit and hey, presto! A seamless, widescreen Paris!More Photoshop tomfoolery later.
Enjoy playing!
6 comments:
I love these posts! I have been stitching images together to post my larger watercolors—I use the opacity and blow the thing up so I can match the pixels, and I use a feathered brush to delete the overlapping edge of the piece on top. What you've done here is more advance, I'm afraid. I bow to your skill. hee hee
Robyn, there is nothing I can teach you about Photoshop; you are the Jedi Master.
You've reminded me, however, that I'll need to add a brush creation post to my Photoshop series at some point.
Today's post was just about using quickie cheat presets. No skill involved but what a fun toy the "Auto-Align" function is!
Poor Mike recently spent days painstakingly stitching together the panoramas he took from the top of the Empire State Building. Unfortunately his copy of Photoshop is too old to have the Auto-Align feature so he had to do it the hard way. Doh!
You da bomb dive! May I keep these for future reference? PLEASE Keep them coming. Most of the time I am too rushed to edit my photos. I do try to edit the paintings.
Since the only bitchin stitchin I plan on doing in the near future involves getting my bobbin fixed so I can use my sewing machine again, I'm glad you're keeping your Photoshop skills sharp so I can keep sending projects your way! Paris looks lovely, as always.
Whoa, easy for Leonardo! That's way beyond my poor brain not to mention computer skills. May I say I'm mighty impressed?
Hee hee, Neetzy. That's the first time in 51 years that anyone has called me 'da bomb.' I shall certainly keep posting the Photoshop stuff as I have tremendous fun playing with it.
Katie: You know I welcome your Photoshop assignments. I can't wait for the next one.
Paris certainly was lovely that day.
Now get that bobbin fixed!
Cynthia: You are way too kind, but thank you. I must confess to having been as overexcited as a two year old dosed up on food additives when I discovered this little stitching tool. Doing this the old-fashioned way used to drive me crazy.
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