June 24, 2007
Auto-Align: It Will Change the Way You Take Photographs
Last year around this time, I took 5 photos from the observation deck of the Calgary Tower which were intended to be merged together to make a wide panorama:
I tried my best to merge the photographs in Photoshop CS manually using layer masking and free transformation and managed to merge just three of the photographs together and the result was this:
The first of many tips from the Creative License Tour
On June 14, I attended the Creative License Tour and learned of two features I did not know existed in Photoshop. These features are Auto-Align and Auto-Blend, and this will change the way we take photographs as we know it.
Typically to capture shots which are required for a panorama, you need to take shots which revolve around an axis as shown in the diagram below:
With these two new features in Adobe Photoshop CS3, the tripod is no longer needed. When you perform Auto-Align, Photoshop will scan through the layers of the current document and calculate which pixels match with the proper layer, and transforms each layer appropriately to achieve astonishing results. What this means is that you can take a photograph every few steps while walking along a street (without a tripod of course), and Photoshop can do all the dirty work for you.
Auto-Align does all the nasty free-transforming for you
Let’s take those 5 photographs I took last year and use them as an example.
To create a panorama out of these, it requires just 3 steps:
- Bring all the photographs into one document in Photoshop
- Select all the layers
- Edit > Auto-Align Layers
(After you click it, you will be presented with some advanced options. I use automatic because I trust Photoshop more than I do myself, but feel free to experiment)
And voila!
Ok, so maybe you’re not so impressed yet. The issue is that each photo can have different exposures and the layers are overlapping. This is where Auto-Blend comes in.
Auto-Blend: This is the part where your jaw drops
The Auto-Blend feature of Photoshop CS3 is meant to be used in succession after Auto-Align. Essentially, it masks each layer appropriately after they’ve been aligned so that they blend properly, resulting in one smooth panoramic photograph.
To use Auto-Blend, just follow these two steps:
- Select all the layers in your document
- Edit > Auto-Blend Layers
And the result…
And the final result cropped…
When I first saw this demonstrated at the Creative License Tour, I was in total awe and amazement, it’s like Photoshop did some magic trick on me! Even as I did this again for this post, I was still amazed.
Feel free to leave any questions or comments, stay tuned for more tips I learned from the Creative License Tour.
GIMP doesn’t include such feature, we use a separate open source application called Hugin:
http://hugin.sourceforge.net/
Thanks very much for this tip. I haven’t had time to experiment much with CS3 yet so this was a great pointer.
I went to Stonehenge a few days ago, and whilst there took 11 photos of it with a handheld telephoto lens deliberately to try this. Not the usual sort of “horizontal” panorama, I took 7 horizontally along the bottom of the stones and then another 4 “on top” of those. So essentially I have 11 pictures between them covering all of it, in a sort of trapezium if you like.
Auto align did a great job of bringing them together. But I also separately tried Photomerge and it nailed it in one go. 11 photos, the whole thing seamlessly blended – absolutely flawless. Would’ve taken me hours to blend all the different joins. Now I have a 15000 pixel high res image of Stonehenge that could be printed 2.5m wide.
For those who think it doesn’t work, come on – it is an incredibly intelligent piece of blending, but it is always going to be dependent on your images. Thanks again!
good job, hope i can do something similar to this one.
when i autoalign 3 or 4 photos o even 2 it doesnt work..
why can it be??
thanks a lot
You copy and paste every picture into a new document. Photoshop should create a new layer for every picture.
Very helpful – I stitched 3 photos together painlessly that I had tried to do manually with no success.
I used this on a friends dissertation for his phd’s about history of art. he has this whole huge cathedral’s cellings afrescos, photographed by him (imagine all the professionalism) made of 6-7 photos. This worked like a charm… and i am quite tech savvy, but the way it undid the lens barrel of awesome. try it b4 ranting on it folks.
Thanks for the tutorial – the final effect looks great! I’ve read some of your other posts and they’re very interesting.
I recently started a new blog called Photoshop Transparency – please check it out if you get a chance – would love to get your feedback.
nice posT!
nice post! thanks for sharing
thanks for contribution. very nice and useful article..
Is the Auto Align here same as what is used in Audio field?
nice article…