All photos ©Rick Sammon

Adobe Photoshop CS3, which includes a new version of Camera RAW and Adobe Bridge, offers many new features that help us enhance and save, to a point, our picture.

One of the most amazing—and fun—features is Photomerge, greatly improved from pervious versions; so much so that I want to share some of their capabilities with you.

Let’s take a look.



Check out this image of my house, which seemingly looks like a panoramic photograph taken with an expensive panorama camera. In actuality, the image is a combination of four images taken with my full-frame digital SLR.

What’s truly amazing is that I did not use a tripod, did not accurately and evenly overlap the photographs, and did not keep the exposure constant for the four images—techniques that used to be required in previous version of Photomerge and in most panorama stitching programs. Basically, I set my Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II on the P (Program) mode and took four pictures in an arch, knowing that Photomerge would magically stitch the images together— seamlessly!

And speaking of seamlessly, in the past, a stitched panorama of landscape or seascape would have been easier to create than a scene like this one, with many vertical lines that could “fool” a stitching program and create noticeable joint points. As you can see, you can’t see where the images are joined. How cool is that!





Here are the four point-and-shoot images. Again, I took them knowing that Adobe Photoshop’s new Photomerge feature would work perfectly, which is why I did not have to work too hard on the images for my panorama.




You find Photomerge by going to File > Automatic > Photomerge. Once there, you simply browse your computer for the images you want to stitch together, select your Layout, and press OK. In a matter of seconds, you have a beautiful panorama – almost.




When your photographs are stitched together, you’ll get an image that looks something like this one. There are several ways to eliminate those unwanted areas (the background layer). The easiest way is to use the Crop tool and crop them out. Another technique is to select the entire image (Select > All) and then use the Transform/Warp feature (Edit > Transform > Warp) and adjust the anchor points until you are pleased with your crop. You can also use the Warp feature, as I did, to correct some distortion, which can happen, as it did in my panorama, when using a very wide-angle lens, a 17mm lens in this case (below).



After your panorama is completed, you’ll probably want to play around with some of the standard Photoshop enhancements to fine-tune your image. But don’t stop there! Play around some more. Experiment with different Filters and Actions. Here I used the Blizzard Action to enhance my snow scene.




Summing up,  the CS3’s new Photomerge is amazing, as well as fun!
    

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Rick Sammon has published 27 books, his latest: Rick Sammon’s Idea to Image, Rick Sammon’s Complete Guide to Digital Photography 2.0, Rick Sammon’s Travel and Nature Photography and Rick Sammon’s Digital Imaging Workshops. Rick has produced DVDs for Photoshop CS2users, including Awaken the Artist Within, Close Encounters with Camera Raw and Photoshop CS2 for the Outdoor and Travel Photographer. Rick teaches dozens of workshops and gives seminars – covering shooting, scanning, saving, enhancing, sharing and printing – each year.

See www.ricksammon.com and www.rickspixelmagic.com for more information.

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