Ever get frustrated that you don’t have a wide lens with you to take the perfect pic? Or you want a really hi res photo but only have a low res camera? Well, here is the solution – Photomerge in Photoshop CS4.

A few months ago I was in Paris for a show with Bryan O’Neill Hughes, Product Manager for Photoshop, and we did some sight-seeing. Now Bryan is a great photographer! No holiday snaps for Bryan… he is the kind of guy that heads out at 5am to get the best light. So I was a little challenged, and being more of a video guy, all I had with me was my Sony AVCHD camera which takes 10 megapixel still images. They are not bad but I had to do something to impress.

I walked to the Arc de Triomphe (a nice 10 minute walk from the Adobe Paris office) and decided to take 25 close up shots of the Arc. They were all hand held and I just aimed and clicked. Very little thought was involved and to be honest I didn’t think it would work.

As you can see I overlapped the images a bit. So with 25 x 10 megapixel shots, I loaded them in Adobe Bridge CS4, selected them all, and chose ‘Tool>Photoshop>Photomerge…’. I went with the default settings ie ‘Auto’ and ‘Blend Images Together’.

Well, as I said I didn’t think it would work… in fact I thought it might explode my laptop. Anyway, the progress bar started and moved slowly so I went to get a coffee. Don’t get me wrong… Photomerge is very fast under normal circumstances, however, if your laptop is stitching 25 large random images, go for coffee! When I returned this was the result.

As you can see it did an amazing job. 25 layers with masks, all editable, and the ‘Blend Images Together’ check box worked a treat especially with shots all using auto exposure. Next, crop the image.

What I was left with was a 771Mb Photoshop file with a resolution of 10957 x 5815. Pretty impressive especially when you look at the detail.

So, next time you are taking holiday snaps, think about taking a bunch of shots and merging them in Photoshop CS4 for that holiday masterpiece. Still not up to Bryan’s standard, but I felt a little better. Its up to you whether you get up at 5am though!

Oh, here is another shot I did the same way. This time it was only 3 shots vertically.

Tags: Add new tag, Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel Tower, Paris, Photomerge, Photoshop

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Creative Suite, Photoshop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.