While on the Subject of Pano's...

This was my first pano in CS3 about a year ago. At the time I was still coming up to speed on Photoshop and did not take the time to play with levels, saturation or curves to make this image pop. None the less it was an impressive (at least to me at the time) assembly of nine images.

How PS does this number crunching is beyond me but the process is very impressive. Once all the images are open in Photoshop, you simply select Photomerge from the Automation menu and sit back and watch the magic happen.

Each image gets it's own layer and layer mask. The layer mask eventually shows a black area that reveals the layer to be merged with the others. What is really interesting here is that one would think there is a high degree of blending between images when in fact it is a very distinct division between the layers. PS simply draws the line so to speak in areas that are the most in common. I say simply when in fact I have no idea how it actually works in the coding of the software. It just looks totally cool when it is done. 

I must admit that I have not pushed PS on the blending by shooting in an automatic mode. I always shoot in manual for panos to establish a baseline exposure between images. It is kind of fun to then turn off each layer one at a time to se where the breaks in the mosaic are.

One note to Lightroom users. Either this does not exist or I have not figured it out yet but once the pano is assembled in PS it creates a new psd file that was not generated in LR. If I bring the pano back to LR I must import it as a file. Another note is that when you choose Edit In Photoshop CS3 in the LR menu you create a second copy of each of the images in LR. When you exit PS you close out those images but they remain duplicated in LR sucking up that hard drive space.

Take care for today... Doug