dekeBytes: Photomerge Also No Longer Sucks

Sorry I couldn't stop by last week, but I was busy fearlessly leading my crackerjack team in the final throes of getting the latest edition of my book, Adobe Photoshop CS3 One-on-One, off to the printer. (An excuse or a shameless plug, you decide. Either way, good news!) This week, I reward your patience by giving you a quick look at another Photoshop feature, which, like Brightness/Contrast, has been elevated from its previous status of "Sucks" into something more like "Rocks" in Photoshop CS3.

Given the power of the Auto-Align feature in Photoshop CS3 I showed you a few weeks ago, it's not surprising that Photoshop CS3 is vastly better when it comes to stitching together seamless panoramas. To prove my point, I have a series of five images I shot without a tripod. Nor did I bother to lock the exposure or aperture in any way. So the images overlap, but they don't match in terms of alignment or color. Stitching these pieces together will be no problem for the new Photomerge.

With the five original photographs open, choose File→Automate→Photomerge. Click Add Open Files and turn on the Advanced Blending check box. Set the Layout option to Cylindrical to avoid any radical perspective distortion and click OK to run the new-and-improved Photomerge script.

The result is a stitched panorama. Because it was a script, you can also bring up the History palette and track every single operation that was applied. If you're not completely satisfied, you can adjust the layers or layer masks by hand. Then use the Ctrl+E shortcut (Command+E on the Mac) to merge the layers together. You can remove the effects of the cylindrical distortion by pressing Ctrl+T (or Command+T) and clicking on the Warp icon on the right side of the options bar. Drag the handles until the image fills the canvas, more or less free of barrel distortion. Press the Enter key (or Return on the Mac) to invoke the warp.

Then kick back and admire the finished result. A little cropping to fix the edges and voila. I won't go so far as to claim Photomerge is perfect, but it's a heck of an improvement over its counterpart in Photoshop CS2 and earlier.