What to do when the photomerge in photoshop stop working? Simplest way is to change to do the merge manual. The following is the procedure:
1. Load all involved photos in photoshop.
2. Use select all (ctrl-A), copy (ctrl-C) and paste (ctrl-V) to stack the photos into layers in one of the photo.
3. Select all layers you have stacked so far in the layers panel. Ctrl+mouse click to select layers.
4. Menu Edit -> Auto-Align Layers -> Projection=Auto ->OK
5. Menu Edit -> Auto-Blend Layers -> Blend Method=Panorama, check the “seamless tones and colors” checkbox -> OK
6. You should get the result of the photomerge by now. Proceed to flatten the image, crop it etc.
Adobe Camera Raw 6 have included a new noise reduction function. The performance of this noise reduction is so well that could render my noise ninja plugin in photoshop useless. Better still, as the noise reduction is built in to the camera instead of photoshop, it make an integral flow in my raw process workflow very nicely.
To use this function, you go to the detail panel (1 in the below screen shot) of camera raw. In this panel, you could find the color slider (2 in the below screen shot) under the noise reduction section. You could zoom in to 100% and look at an area where noise is most prominent before you start with this adjustment. Then drag the color slide from 0 up slowly until you find all color noise is gone. Wow, that is it. I am impressed by default the kind of detail that is preserved with the noise removal.
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The Faststone Image Viewer’s latest Version 4.0 is available since Nov 19, 2009 . The following is a quote from their website about the improvements make in this version:
- Enhanced the skins and toolbar icons. Now the windows have drop shadow effect in Vista and Windows 7
- Added “Search and Replace” to Batch Rename
- Added “Renaming Preview” to Batch Rename
- Enhanced “Conversion Preview” in Batch Convert. Now it is possible to compare the original and converted images side by side
- In Advanced Options for Batch Convert, added an option to specify whether color adjustments (brightness, contrast, sharpening etc.) should be made before or after resizing.
- Shows GPS information in the “Image Properties” window. A “Show in Google Earth” button will be available if the image has GPS information
- Added “Border Effects” under Edit menu
- Added an option to remove EXIF/IPTC data when emailing images
- Added shortcuts for favorite folders
- Improved performance on network folders
- Improved compatibility with Windows 7
- Fixed bugs
- Other minor improvements
Do not feel that there is anything improve on the performance overall. Browsing thru raw files is still not as snappy as I would like but still better than Adobe bridge. The Faststone Image viewer can be download here:
http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDownload.htm
This time, I am trying to look at the result of a mild digital push on files taken from my D700. The following are 2 file taken at 2 EV apart that I took for making an HDR image. I took these 2 file too see how it go if I push the -2 EV file so that it look like the 0 EV file. It is quite amazing to see that after the process, the -2 EV file don’t show any noticeable noise after the push. You could see the 100% comparison here, the left half is the 0EV while the right half is the -2EV after push:
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