I don’t know if this has been discussed before, but in using the Photomerge option to reassemble 4 parts of a large picture, two of the four will have different shades of the colors in the photo.
The phenomenon does not exist when viewing the four parts side-by-side, only after the photomerge has taken place. This has only begun recently. I have not had any problems with this in earlier photomerge operations.
The system is a Dell computer running Windows XP & Photoshop Elements 2 and a CanoScan LiDE 80. We know this is not a problem with the scanner, as two different LiDE 80’s exhibit the same problem, but when a photomerge is done of the same picture on a Mac using either of the 2 scanners, we don’t have a problem.
Would appreciate any suggestions to correct this. thanks.
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It happens a lot when you are using photomerge … areas that show it most tend to be the sky and sea. Sometimes when you have the images side by side it is hard to see the colour difference but photomerge seems to show them all up.
It is usually a diagonal line and I generally use the clone tool set at a low opacity to blend it in.
And if your using pictures you took, think hard BEFORE putting a polarizing filter on the lens. If you decide to, re-think long and hard again before going ahead and take a set without it as back-up shots. (Been there, done that, never again)
I recently had the same problem. I first adjusted the brightness of each photo to equalize the brightness as shown by the first photomerge operation. Then after the second photomerge, I did exactly what Wendy Williams suggested, using the clone tool, but I only had minimum correction to do since I had equalized the brightness first.
Thanks, Wendy, Bill & Morton. At least I am relieved to learn that this is a common problem, and not something unique to my circumstances.
Bill, actually the images are record albums. I discovered after talking with several other collectors that the most managable means of getting a 12.75 X 12.75 album cover into a computer on an 10.5 X 8 scanner was to scan quadrants, so I don’t have any control over the original images.
First time I used Photomerge it happened to me and I thought it was was something I had done wrong .. but everyone seems to encounter the same thing.
Even if you match up the colours before you start there seems to be something in the the way that Photomerge blends the image that still causes the line to occur.
No, it’s exactly the same in PE 3, at least as far as matching goes. What PE 3 does have is the Healing Brush, which is a great help for blending the seams on the finished merge.
I was going to say that I recall reading in a magazine tutorial a year or so back that the tutor mentioned the importance of turning off automatic settings on your camera (exposure, ISO, aperture etc) and setting these manually when shooting the original images. This is due, he explained, to the fact that as you rotate your camera/body to snap the differing segments of your panorama, there will be differing camera a settings for each image according to issues like cloud cover, light readings according to the location of the light source, etc. This certainly seemed to make some sense when I practised with shots of the same panorama at both night and day.
However I’m completely fluxomed by the fact that you had a constant light source in the form of your scanner. I had thought that maybe PSE takes EXIF data and uses that when stitching (hence the warning in the tutorial about ensuring that they are constant for all of the images in the photomerge). Clearly not, but at least you have been offered some great work arounds.
Thanks everyone. We googled around and found several bits of info on this, finding that the problem isn’t all that uncommon.
What still perplexes me is that close scrutiny of the same photomerge done on the Mac produces substantially less of the effect than does the Dell. The two versions of the software can’t be that different, can they?
I think you will find that sometimes the healing brush works best to remove the line & sometimes the clone tool does the job best. Then there are the #$%^ cases where one part needs one tool and another portion needs the other. At least in Photoshop 7 and CS I’ve found that to be the case. So be prepared to go to the trial and error method.
When you say that the Mac produced a different result on the same image it doesn’t surprise me …. but I don’t think that it is anything to do with which platform you are using. you will find out that if you use the same images and simply redo the photomerge then you can get totally different results on the same PC.
I have a Canon printer and it came with a product called Photostitch 3.1 which I have found more reliable than Photomerge. Photostitch seems to ‘jon’ the images over a larger area that Photomerge and I just ‘can’t see the join’ whereas I can usually detect it easily in Photomerge. It is also amazingly fast and has a nice graphical interface for image arrangement. I believe it also comes with Canon cameras, but don’t know if it is available as a download despite working as a totally standalone product.
I think that Adobe’s photomerge is an inferior product not only for the above probelm but also with difficulties in making a seamless ‘stitch’ on some merges. I use Arc-soft ‘Panoramamaker’ or Canon ‘Photostitch’. Not always trouble free 9depending on the photos) but in manual mode (especially with panoramamaker) I can usually get a great merge.
SG B. You ask about PSE3! Last issue of Better digital had a feature on Pano’s using pse3, the writer said that It’s much improved over 2 and one can construct a pano using layers, this enables things like levels to be used to fine tune the match before resorting to clone etc. There is a new "Auto Stitch beta" <http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html> for free download which is suposed to be rather good, I did have a play with it to compare it with others and usually I find that one is better at one thing and another is better at another thing, doesn’t seem to be an excellent one fits all stitcher. Regards Malcolm
In defense of PSE 3; It is possible to make a decent panoramic photo.
This image was made from two, hand held, vertical shots. I didn’t use the clone stamp or healing brush. The only flaw, is a little spot down at the bottom, that could be easily fixed.
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