Fun With Photomerge

This is from today's hike to Lake Serene. It's a 360 degree composite image from 33 individual shots. Handheld.

I continue to be impressed with the capability of Photoshop's Photomerge function. You're only supposed to be able to do this kind of shot with a panoramic base, where you level the camera and rotate it around the lens nodal point. I used to use PTGUI to stitch the images I made this way.

In this case, I made three scans of the scene, making overlapping exposures: one level, one pointed up, and one pointed down. The only nod I made to traditional stitched pan technique was to set the exposure to manual. Photomerge was smart enough to recognize that it was a three-level pan, and made flawless stitches.

The lovely thing about such a file is that each image is on a layer, with a layer mask. If there are errors, you can play with the masks to fix things.

Click on the image to open up a larger view. The psd image these are derived from is 14000 pixels wide. 900 megabytes. And I used a source file size at half the native resolution.

Comments

[Beau Harbin]

This is really great! Awesome technique.