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Digital Darkroom: Tossed Table Panorama

and I'm gonna come up here. I'm gonna open them all up into, um, adobe camera raw. We use this as a starting point, and I'm purposely going to do a little bit of a different tweak to it, because I'm gonna come up here and I'm gonna rotate thes images a little bit just off the horizontal and vertical, because what I want to do is I'm creating this, um, tossed on the table collage. So the fact of them not being in exact alignment is actually what I'm going for it. If I was new, uh, that I was going for this sort of technique, I would, as I mentioned, I would almost shoot randomly. Or you could put your camera on burst mode. If you've got enough light and kind of paint, the scene will say that this is, um, what I'm going for. So I want him a little bit out of kilter because that just kind of adds to the effect and you'll see what I'm talking about. In a second also will say that maybe if we want to add a little bit more clarity and maybe a little bit more vibrance just because we can to t...

hese files, I'll slicked all and synchronize those settings. I don't want that crop to be synchronized, but we'll go ahead and think everything else. And now I'm going to say, done. I could open these up as objects into photo shop. Actually, let's do that because the free transform and everything else that we do can be done to smart objects and by going whether if I did exactly what I just did inside of light room or whether I do it inside of adobe camera raw, Um, the great thing with what we're gonna be doing by doing this kind of rotation distortion of our image is, um can be done to, as I mentioned raw files. So I can, even after I do the distortion, do that a little edge effect to it. Everything that I do to it can be undone or can be pliable. So let me kind of explain that and, uh, actually, will I just I want that a little bit higher up there, So I'm gonna come up here, select all and open his objects. We're going to see a panorama I couldn't stitch, but the alignment of the images is what I'm going for now. So I've got my three images as smart objects among you said I could. The nice thing is on, um, if I was in the bridge, if I had said Okay, there are little features. Dr. Brown Russell Brown, art director, creative director for Adobe has little, um, scripts. One of them, uh, is Thea Stack O Matic, which lets you bring in I'm smart objects and, ah, all at one time to a file, So but this case will do it manually. I'm just dragging over the icons from my separate files. So I have them here and let's see if we can do what I'm hoping to do. Yeah. See, I was getting a little bit greedy here. What we're gonna do is we've got are three separate files here, and I want to take advantage of basically the exact same thing that's built into, um, photo merge, which is to align the layers without blending them. And this actually is a really nice thing to talk about in terms of panorama is because sometimes, especially when you have so many images to work on, you'll notice that when I was doing that one combination of images where it was just kind of dude, really. It's just taking forever. When you're working with a lot of images or a lot of high res images and you literally are running out of RAM, you don't have the terabytes that might be necessary for stitching together hundreds of high resolution files coming from your SLR. Breaking it into multiple steps of one. Loading them all in its layers is one step saving the file, aligning all the layers, saving it as a file and then blending all the layers as a separate step is actually is a nice little way around. This idea of it choking and saying I can't even do it couldn't align it couldn't blend it. Or in this case, it's something that's built into Photoshopped. You actually have everything that's associated with foot emerge built into photo shop, but it's a two step process. So let's kind of back up here with what we're talking about. I'm actually rather than doing what I just did here. Let's I'm gonna go ahead and not save this file. Do it like you would normally do it. Go back into bridge here are my files that I just manipulated that will expand that little serious here. They have now been edited. You can see that little icon. Now I'm gonna come up here and we'll go into tools. Photo shop photo merge. Okay, so I was trying to do a little sneaky aspect of it, but we'll go ahead and do it this way. So we're going to do foot emerge, just like we would dio inside of light room. We've done our tweaks. In this case. We're not worried about the alignment of the images. So photo merge. We're now going to use Kalash. We're not going to say blend images together. Collage is going to try and align those images, but it's going to keep them in rectangles. Okay, We're not gonna do vignette or geometric distortion correction where all we're trying to do is align those images. And here is our file, and I'm going to see in a second. We're going to exaggerate that alignment, But you can see one. Why? I kind of tilted it. I purposely wanted them a little bit out of alignment. I could have made that even mawr exaggerated. You'll see. I will go ahead and exaggerated even more so by using that, um, Kalash it left them just as a normal panorama as separate items on separate layers. As we turn them all on, you'll see that they're all rectilinear. But it did bring them into one document and align them. This is exactly the same if I had brought them in together not as smart objects but as regular layers in that open process when I was in adobe camera raw, um, edit auto align layers brings up the exact same dialog box where you can collage and do your whatever you'd like. So auto a line inside a photo shop does that exact same first step and then auto blend is exactly where you can say do a panorama, and it will seamlessly do tones and colors. So if you are for some reason, you've got your image set inside a photo shop already, maybe you've done retouching on it, or you just find yourself inside a photo shop, selecting your layers in doing auto align as a first step, as I mentioned also, if you're running out of ram, take all your images. Open them up is layers and Photoshopped, save the file. Do select the layers. They auto align, save the file and then blend the layers. It's breaking it up so it doesn't have to keep all of those calculations inside of RAM. And again, Ram is always at a premium. Ram is the elbow room in which the computer works by breaking up panorama, stitching into multiple steps, you can get away with more, especially with a high resolution image. Okay, so let's do this collage technique that you saw before. I'm using the crop tool, and I'm gonna extend my canvas size. If you didn't know any time your canvas, you can crop out as well as in. So I simply just extended out and I extended my canvas size. I'm now going to come over here and I'm gonna kind of exaggerate, which I'm going to do even further later on. But I'm gonna exaggerate the files to kind of exaggerate the misalignment to exaggerate this field for my clash. I can, even if I wanted to exaggerate it. We'll do that after the fact I'll find Tune this because the rotation that I'm looking for actually want it. Um okay, I'll do it now, Commander Control T. And I'm just going to come up here, and I'm gonna kind of exaggerate the files in terms of that. So commander control t will rotate, you know, and I'm purposely exaggerating that little tossed on the table appearance of my images. Okay. And also the misalignment of the images. Okay, that's really misaligned. Still trying to tell the story of the arch. Okay, you get the general idea. Okay. One, I'm gonna give it a background. So I'm gonna come over here to my layers palette and where you find your adjustment layers. A lot of people don't realize that that 1st 3 actually are Phil layers. They're not adjustment layers. So you could do a solid color. You could do a pattern or texture. I've got a number of patterns that I I'm like I've created. So, as an example, I may do something like a, uh, Let's do not Hawaiian we've got. Um actually, we've got libraries. Thes will be part of the that set of preset that I mentioned before. We're going to do organic patterns and that will give us things like black rice paper. I like that. These air seamlessly tiling patterns. Put that on the bottom. So now I've got a little background for my image. I know I'm gonna put on a white frame on these files. So now I'm gonna slick one of the images, and I'm going to come up here and I'm gonna go to my effects pop out, which are your layer styles. They used to be known as layer effects has the little effects. And I'm gonna come up here and I'm going to do a stroke and stroke starts off black. But I'm gonna tell it what you please make that white, and we'll do it on the outside. We're gonna do a little bit more of an antique photograph, has a little rounded edge to it. So we're gonna do a outside I'm stoked to the file at the same time. Here. Let's go ahead and do a little drop shadow and the drop shadow is gonna allow me toe further. Exaggerate this, you know, fact that they are tossed on the table, we will give it a nice size. So it's got a little softness to it. The default setting for all your effects when you can see that I can move that around manually. Um, but the default setting for your drop shadow happens to be multiply. And if you want, if you're you may or may not know all your blend modes or organized based upon, um, what the's blend modes do. So I'm gonna go down too soft light, which is actually gonna be much more of it, like a dodge and burn of that file, a much more subtle than a multiply. So we'll say that that is good enough for there were coming up to our file. So I like that I can come over here to this layer effects and I can right click and say what you copied that layer style. Go to my two other files, right? Click and say Pace that layer style. So now I've got my kind of cards going on, and the last thing that I'll do here is use that same image warp that we've used that we used before for fixing an image. And now I'm gonna come over here and do that. What was the keyboard shortcut for? Free transform Command T control T, and I'm now in free transform. Normally, there'd be a little button here for image war. But we'll go ahead down here to transform. Will do that war. I could manually just kind of dog year that pages if they've, you know, coming in, which may just be fine. Or if I wanted to. I can undo that and do that same kind of arch instead of arch paper. Wouldn't do that. But paper would do this sort of scenario where just kind of comes up and, you know, does a little fold. There will come up here kind of like that Down. Go to my next one, will go right to image War right now to that same little march here if we want to get cute. See, you get that same idea. Come over here. We'll do that. Free transform. Now, we'll just go ahead and, uh, will just warp that corner. Just give it a little No bringing up of that edge. Okay, so, um, that is not quite. I liked antique that stroke. The nice thing with that stroke, you know that stroke rather than color. You can come up here with a pattern and we can add Let's add that white rice paper to it. So It has a little bit of a, um, texture to it. And I'm now I'm gonna take down that pattern. We'll say that that's go ahead. And again, I can do that same sort of thing where I come up here and copy that layer style and then select other layers and then paste that layer style getting a little convoluted here. But you get that general idea we could continue to find to net. But, um, these are separate layers. We could continue to fine tune them. What we're doing here a little bit too cute, see for my taste. But one we took advantage of foot emerge. We did not say blend. We did not do auto. We went down to the collage option and that no matter how we did that collage in again, this would be that scenario where I can go crazy. I shot them in alignment. That's one of the things that's a little bit here. Since I didn't shoot them like this. They're really not quite the same. Look, if you remember what we got with you got to see this. We had that wonderful little they think they lined up, but the edges were irregular. So just keep that in the back of your mind. This idea that you can shoot, you know, almost like this out in the field take advantage of your collage option. It will actually line up the image even though the parameters of your image you're gonna have this nice irregularity. In this case, we took advantage of our stroke to automatically do all our little stroking technique. Here you can turn off your styles and you'll see that the layer styles are just a little adjustment added to the file. They're really not permanently part of the file. There's my files here, layer styles are procedural. They're just applied on the fly. That's why I could change the manipulation of the image by doing that warp, and it's gonna follow the contours of whatever I do. That's the really nice thing about layer styles. So anyway, and then we did. We took advantage of our little stroking to get our little edge effects. We'll show the effects again. And, um, basically how we started on her collage little bit more of a Photoshopped technique than a clash technique. But I kind of like it