PhotoWalkPro

I am usually content to create simple pano images using a series of 5 or so overlapping shots all in a straight line. I have always had confidence that the Photomerge function in Photoshop would do a pretty good job of pulling everything together into one seamless image (at least since CS3). But as I was standing at the Cerro de la Cruz above the city of La Antigua, I just didn’t think that I could capture all the detail I wanted by simply shooting a straight pan of images. The problem is that I would have to use a focal length that was pretty wide to capture everything I wanted, from the top of the volcano to the front edge of the city sprawled out below. This meant that I might get some distortion from the lens as well as lesser detail in the final image.

What I decided to do instead was to shoot two series of images panning across the scene; one across the upper portion of the scene to capture the sky, mountains, and volcano, and the other series across the bottom for the city. I also used my 50mm f/1.4 lens on a Nikon D80 so I was getting less coverage (it’s about the equivalent of an 80mm on the DX camera), which meant more shots. In fact I ended up shooting 18 images in total. I was a little fearful that Photoshop would not be able to assemble everything into one seamless image but I threw caution to the wind and made my corrections to the original images in Lightroom 3 and then selected them all and sent them to Photoshop using the Merge to Panorama command.

After Lightroom had processed all of the images, the standard Pano dialog box opened in CS5 and I selected the Auto layout and let it go to town. It took a little while to assemble and merge the 18 RAW image files and then blend them together but when it was done, I was simply amazed with the results. With the exception of some ragged edges, it had pulled all of the images together into one beautiful pano. I simply cropped out most of the uneven edges and then used the Content Aware Fill to fix some of the spots in the sky that were missed by me during shooting and cropping. The result is the image you see below. You can click on it to see a larger version but the actual file is about 440MB, which works out to be about 20×70 inches at 240dpi.

Also, the detail in the final image is fantastic. Here is a small section of the image at 100%.

So the next time you are presented with a wide vista and are thinking of trying your hand at a panorama, don’t necessarily just twist your lens to the wide angle option to get 3 or 4 overlapping shots. Try and push things a little by adding a bunch of narrower angle images and then let Photoshop do it’s thing to really get the detail and size out of your final image.

I’m a huge proponent of keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop.  I use them all the time to quickly switch tools, create new layers, print my images, and a ton of other general tasks.  I don’t even come close to knowing all of them but I do have my favorites that I have memorized over time.  One task that I have to do a lot of these days is converting my images to a different color profile for my books so they can be printed in CMYK. Unfortunately there is no keyboard shortcut for this operation.

When I am working on a book, I will use this command about a hundred times. Since I like to work fast I figured it was high time that this menu function get its own keyboard shortcut.  Luckily this is a very easy operation in Photoshop.  I’m not sure which version started allowing for custom shortcuts but I can tell you that it is a fantastic feature that is pretty darn easy to set up.

The first thing to do is to open the Custom Keyboard Shortcut dialog box. You can acces it though the menu or by using the keyboard shortcut, CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+K.  Once it’s open, just look for the command that you want to add a shortcut to.  Each menu item is listed so it’s just a matter of locating it.

To add a shortcut, just click in the vacant area of that item in the same location that the other shortcuts are. A small text window will appear. The next step is to type in the shortcut that you want to use.  Here’s where it gets a little tricky.  There are already a lot of shortcuts already in use so you can either use one that you might never use in your day-to-day work, or get creative and come up with a unique one. If you type in one that is already being used you will get a warning message alerting you to which command that keyboard shortcut is already associated with.  You can go ahead and use it or try again.

In my case, I opted to go with OPT+CMD+Q, which actually let’s me activate it using just two fingers (I press the CMD and OPT keys at the same time with my thumb and use my index finger to press the Q key).

Now I can quickly convert my files to CMYK and move on to the next image with just a couple of quick keystrokes.

So next time you find yourself using a menu item a lot and it doesn’t have a shortcut, start working faster and smarter by making your own.

Most of you heard the news last Friday that Photoshop CS5, along with most all of the Creative Suite products, is now available for purchase.  So for many of you the question now is, “Is it really worth my hard earned cash to upgrade?” This is never an easy question to answer because, once you clear past the frenzy of the upgrade excitement, you need to find out if there is enough in the upgrade to warrant your investment. Personally I have always had an every other year policy on upgrades.  CS4 was the first time I actually went up a single version from the previous.  There was enough in the CS4 upgrade that I felt confident that it would be a worthwhile investment.

Now with CS5, I am once again looking at the cost of an upgrade and considering how this will work in my favor. Of course, I have had a real advantage over most of you because I have been testing the beta version for some time.  This has given me an insight into the new features and tweaks that help making that decision a little easier.  Now that Adobe has released CS5, you have that advantage as well.  My advice to you would be to download the trial and give it a spin.  There are a lot of new enhancements to this version and the chances are that after trying it, you are gonna want to buy it, but maybe you won’t.  If you are completely satisfied with your current version and don’t think you will really put any of the new stuff into your workflow then skip it.  Don’t worry, No one will really start mocking you until you are more than 2 versions behind

To find your trial version, head to the Downloads page at Adobe.com

Sticking with my theme from my last CS5 feature post of new CS5 features that benefit photographers, today I’m covering the Lens Correction filter.  Lens correction has been in previous versions of Photoshop but Adobe did something really cool for CS5.  The Lens Correction filter now includes an Auto Correction feature that has built-in profiles for your lens.  This means that Photoshop is actually looking at your metadata and then finds the appropriate distortion correction for the lens that you used.  There are tons of built in profiles but if you don’t see yours included in the list, you can click the  Search Online button to find one that matches based on your camera make, model, and lens. There are even third party lenses included in the list as evidenced by the images below that were shot with a Nikon body and a Sigma 24-70 lens.

So now instead of playing with a bunch of sliders, which are still available in Custom panel, you can quickly fix your lens distortion by using the Auto Correction feature and quickly get things into proper perspective.

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I thought instead of trying to squeeze all of the things I love about CS5 into one post I would instead break it up over a few days.  There are a lot of great things in this latest version as I’m sure you have heard and it’s hard to say what is the best thing.  I thought today I would start with a feature that will have some of the greatest impact for photographers in general and that’s the new Noise Reduction built into Camera Raw 6.

I’m sure that everyone is geeking out about Content Aware Fill and HDRPro, and I will most defintiely get to them but let’s face it, unless you are Trey Ratcliff, you probably aren’t shooting HDR all the time.  Noise reduction however is something that all photographers really need.  Even though many of today’s digital cameras have amazing low-light capabilities, noise is something that will still be a factor, especially if you are shooting high ISO’s or long exposures.

So how good is the new noise reduction?  Good enough that I probably won’t need to ever use a plug-in to get rid of it again.  The thing is that, unlike most plug-ins that are applying noise reduction to an already processed image, the noise reduction in CS5 is applied directly to your RAW image so it has more information to work with when eliminating those problem pixels.

Here’s a quick run through on how it works.  First thing you need to do is open your image using Camera Raw.  This is where you will find the Noise Reduction sliders, hiding in the Detail panel.

(Make sure you click the images to see them larger)

The first thing I like to do is zoom in to 100% and then adjust my image sharpening by using the Amount slider and then using the Masking slider to apply the sharpening to just the edges.

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