Peachpit TV: Aligning Images in Photoshop CS4

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Hi, I am Rich Harrington and I am live at Photoshop World, and I am going to take a chance to take a look at of some of the cool new features in Photoshop CS4. What I want to look at today are some of the new tools for doing aligning and blending. This works great for panoramic images, or merging multiple photos together.

So let us take a look. I got two photos here that were handheld shots, and this is a literally a cyborg that piloted one of the test pilot spaceships early days in NASA. So I shot this out of the (00:00:43) Museum in Washington D.C.

Out of this handheld shots, I got two pictures here, now what we are going to do is actually open these up in the Photoshop and align them together. So pretty straightforward stuff. I am going ahead and choose tools, Photoshop, and I am going ahead and say load this files into Photoshop layers.

Now, real straightforward stuff, it goes, it puts them in, they are both in there, no problem. Obviously though, these two pictures are not aligned, so we are going to take care of that. I just shift click on both layers so they are selected and I could say edit, auto align layers.

Let us going to look at it, it going to think about it, and really the auto option does everything you need it to do. So I just click OK, and it is going to think for a second. It is going to take those layers, rotate them, bend them, turn them, do everything it needs to do to get them totally aligned.

Now you see there, it has done a good job. It has aligned it. Let us take that full screen. F for full screen, and we are going to zoom that back just a little bit. Now it is a line, but there is definitely an edge here.

Notice though the picture has been bent and warped, it gone ahead and lined everything up, but we definitely see a line here for exposure, no big deal. Photoshop CS4 adds a really cool auto blend feature that works great with this auto align. I simply choose edit, auto blend layers. It thinks about it for a second, I say you all treat this like a it is a panoramic image, that is fine, and make sure you do some scene less tones and colors.

I click OK, it thinks about it for a little bit, and then it has blended it together. If you look at these individual layers, you will see it actually traced all the details in the image and created a perfect blend between the two photos.

We are all set there, I just grab the crop tool, and we will go and crop that out, and there you have it, created a nice bigger photo by taking two individual photos and stitching them together.

That is the auto align and auto blend layer command. Works absolutely great to start stitching together multiple photos to make bigger photos. Be sure to check that out as well as the new enhanced photo merge command that adds a bunch of really cool functionality and harnesses that advanced blending as well.

I am Rich Harrington, you could check out my book “Understanding Adobe Photoshop CS4” available over at Peachpit.com, as well as find a whole bunch of other great videos up in the learning center. Thanks.

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