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A nice touch I like to add — especially to photos printed in magazines and books or displayed on the Web — is a thin black line around the image. It’s an efficient way to separate the image from the rest of the page and add a classy look. To create a thin black line, follow these steps:

1. Open a photo that’s been corrected and edited.

2. Create a new layer.


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The Stroke command will not start using the background layer unless you make a selection by choosing SelectOAll, but I would rather perform this step in a separate layer; duplicate the background layer (by choosing LayerODuplicate Layer) to give the command something to work on. 3. Choose EditOStroke (see Figure 13-22). Enter a width of 3 or 4 pixels. Choose black in the Color field,
And then click Inside as your Setting for Location. Figure 13-22: The Stroke command. 4. Click OK. The image shows a 3-pixel-wide black border like the one in Figure 13-23.

Figure 13-23: Image with a thin black line.
Comments Off 4:08 am Stitching Panoramas Comments Off by admin in Your Work
As a photographer who shoots landscapes often, I’ve grown quite fond of the Photoshop Photomerge feature: You use it to stitch together some chosen images that were shot in a panoramic sequence to create (well, yeah) a panorama. I’ve used it often, and can’t resist showing off great results like the panoramic of the London riverfront in Figure 13-16.

Figure 13-16: Panorama stitched with Photomerge.

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Shooting panoramas

I’d be remiss in my duties if I showed you only how to stitch together panoramas without first mentioning how to Shoot Them! For best results, take 3 or 4 photos of a scene, all with the same exposure and white-balance setting. All you need is a really cool panoramic scene to shoot, and a couple of basic techniques.

Speaking of basics, here are some tips for shooting panoramic scenes:

W* Select a scene that’s either wide or tall. Hey, nobody ever said panoramic images Had To be horizontal! You can also shoot tall scenes from top to bottom to stitch together later. (Too bad nobody builds giant moon rockets anymore.)

W* Mount your digital camera to a sturdy tripod. I always recommend shooting as many of your photos on a tripod as humanly possible. A tripod helps you achieve the sharpest possible photos, especially when you’re shooting in low-light conditions and your shutter speed is less than 1⁄125 of a second. Look through your viewfinder or LCD and pan the scene from left to right (or top to bottom) to make sure your camera is level. If you see that your panning is a little off, adjust your tripod head to level your camera as best as you can.

W* Meter the main part of the scene. I recommend using manual shutter-speed, aperture, and white-balance settings. Look at your LCD or view-finder to see how your digital camera is metering the scene. Switch to manual mode, and then set your shutter speed and aperture to match your digital camera’s first meter reading of the scene. The idea is to ensure that the exposure is the same for every photo sequence you shoot. Additionally, set your white balance manually to match the conditions you’re shooting in, such as daylight, overcast, or shade.

W* Take a series of photos. If you’re shooting a horizontally oriented scene, start on the left, and take the first shot. Pan your camera to the right until you’ve overlapped the previous shot by 1⁄3. Take the second shot. Pan to the right again until you’ve overlapped the previous shot by 1⁄3, And take the photo. If your panorama requires a fourth frame, repeat the process, overlapping the previous frame by 1⁄3.

1^ Review your photos. Using your digital camera’s LCD, review your photos to make sure you achieved the results you intended. Check to make sure your images are sharp and properly metered. If you need to, take another series of panoramic shots using different zoom settings on your lens. Keep shooting different aspects of the scene to make sure that you captured the panoramic frames you know will make a great continuous scene. Figure 13-17 shows three separate frames I shot to use for my panorama, overlapping each by 1⁄3 of a frame.

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Figure 13-17: Three photos taken in overlapping sequence.

Using Photomerge

Now that you have a number of images taken in sequence that you can use to stitch together into a panorama, it’s time to use Bridge and Photomerge. Photomerge is a Photoshop utility that’s accessible from both Bridge and the Photoshop FileOAutomate menu. I find it easiest to use Bridge to choose my images first:

1. Open Bridge and select the folder to choose your images from.

2. Process the images using Camera Raw.

Assuming that the images you want for your panorama are still in raw format, you’ll need to process each of the 3 or 4 images you’ll be using.

To ensure all of the images you’ll be using for your panorama share the same Camera Raw adjustments:

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A. Process the first image in the sequence in Camera Raw.

Make necessary raw adjustments to White Balance, Exposure, Shadows, Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, and Curves.

B. Copy raw settings.

You’ll want to apply the settings made to the first image to the remaining 2 or 3 images in your sequence. This will ensure that adjustments are the same for each image in your panorama, which is important because you want all the images to have the same color and tone throughout.

To copy raw settings, right-click (Ctrl+click on a Mac) on the image thumbnail in bridge, and choose Copy Camera Raw Settings as shown in Figure 13-18.

Figure 13-18: Copy Camera Raw Settings.

C. Paste raw settings to the remaining images.

Select the remaining images in your sequence into which you want to paste the Camera Raw settings: Click their thumbnails while holding down the Alt key (Option key on a Mac); then right-click (Ctrl+click on a Mac) and choose Paste Camera Raw Settings from the flyout menu.

3. Select images in Bridge to Photomerge.

Select each photo intended for your panorama in Bridge by holding the Alt key (Option key on the Mac) while clicking each image.

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4. Choose ToolsOPhotoshopOPhotomerge (see Figure 13-19).

Figure 13-19: Choosing Photomerge from the Tools menu.

Photomerge attempts to assemble the images as one. For some panoramas, Photomerge can’t quite figure out the entire panorama on its own, so you’ll have to drag the images into the Photomerge window yourself (and line them up in the proper position there) to complete your panorama.

Figure 13-20 shows the Photomerge window with the panoramic image stitched together.

Figure 13-20: The Photomerge window.

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Part V: The Part	T of Tens________________________________________________ Click the Advanced Blending check box. After checking the Advanced Blending check box, click the Preview button. Advanced blending gives you a better preview of how well Photomerge combined your images. You may have to use the Select Image tool to move individual images around so they overlap properly. Use the Zoom tool to magnify the different overlapping areas of your image so you can check the overlap for each part of the panorama. Click OK to load the panorama into Photoshop. Crop the image. When you get the image into Photoshop, crop the image to ensure the borders of the image don’t contain any white space. Figure 13-21 shows the final cropped image.
5.

6. 7.

Figure 13-21: Final panorama.
8. Complete final color, tonal corrections, and edits. As with any image, go through your overall corrections and editing workflows to finish the image and get it ready for output. Start by using the Levels, Curves, and the Hue/Saturation adjustment levels to fine-tune color and tone. Make any needed edits such as dodging and burning, covered in Chapter 11. Comments Off February 24, 2010 10:12 pm Creating Abstracts with Extreme Cropping Comments Off by admin in Your Work
In the course of writing books on digital photography and discussing techniques (some of which are pretty abstract themselves) with other photographers, I’ve come to the conclusion that none of us can come up with a good definition for what a photographic Abstract Is. To me, an abstract is a representation of an object — possibly distorted — that doesn’t represent what exactly an object actually is. (Ack. See what I mean?) It’s a visual description that doesn’t make sense. Fortunately, that’s the point: Abstracts aren’t Supposed To make sense!
I often like to shoot subjects that Don’t quite look like anything you’ll
Normally see in the everyday world.
Figure 13-12: Abstract of lights. Stract. (Okay, it moving the cam done, but what Is It? Good question. Take an aspirin.)
T N
Ghts shot at How it was
One technique I like to use involves some extreme cropping of macro (extreme close-up) shots. If you haven’t noticed by now, I shoot photos of flowers

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Whenever I can. Often I take macro shots of flowers, crop small areas of the flower in Photoshop, and zoom in even more, till you can’t tell what you’re looking at. Because the original was a macro shot, there’s detail that the human eye can’t see without aid. The final images you can get with this technique can be fun, unusual, and often provide interesting subject matter for (yes) artsy conversations.

Using this technique involves cropping. Cropping even small areas of an image means you’re throwing away a lot of pixels. If the photo you want to crop was shot with a 5-megapixel compact digital camera, you may wind up with an image that doesn’t have enough resolution for large prints. You can try interpolating the image (using the ImageOImage Size command), but interpolation will get you only so far. For this technique, make sure (if possible) that you start out with images shot at the highest resolution your digital camera will offer.

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My technique is pretty simple:

1. Choose a close-up photo.

Many digital cameras have a Macro mode That gets you within an inch of your subject (or closer), filling the frame with an extreme close-up like the photo in Figure 13-13.

2. Make overall color and tonal corrections to the image.

Make sure you’ve finished adjusting white balance, shadows, exposure, levels, curves, and hue/saturation Before Cropping your image. (For more about these adjustments, see Chapters 10 and 11.)

3. Crop a portion of the image as you desire.

Using the Crop tool, crop the portion of the image you want, as in the example shown in Figure 13-14. Be sure to specify width, height, resolution, and dimension settings on the Option bar.

Figure 13-15 shows the final abstract image.