Photomerging with Photoshop CS3

5:41pm - 4 May 2007 - 387 views -
Posted in: For Geeks Only

I read an article that mentioned Photoshop CS3’s panorama stitching tool has been significantly improved. I’ve been a fan of this tool ever since Photoshop CS. Though I must admit, the photomerge in CS still has room for improvements. It does not always produce accurate results. Well I think the main problem is the cameraman (yours truly), but if there’s a good reason to buy such an expensive photo editing suite – it’d be for compensating the total lack of photography skills of the user So when I heard CS3’s photomerging has been improved, I was eager to give it a shot.

And I must say, I was thoroughly impressed by what the new CS3 managed came up with compared to the previous CS. CS3 managed to merge almost all pictures with excellent accuracy and effectively aligned and tweaked the angles of the pictures to suit the overall picture without my help. With the same sets of pictures, CS didn’t manage to do it by itself and even when I tried I couldn’t blend the pictures well.

Here are some samples I came up with:

CS

CS3

 

CS

CS3

 

CS

CS3

 

Even when the pictures are so small, the distortions are obvious especially in the third sample. It is without a doubt that CS3’s photomerging has been significantly improved. I’ve been doubtful of whether or not to change to CS3 for my day-to-day use. I didn’t change to CS2 because I felt that the improvements were not significant enough and at the same time it wouldn’t work with almost all of my plugins.

But in this case, it looks like I have a good reason to keep CS3 running. If I get the chance, I’d like to try out another new feature of CS3 – Smart Objects. Maybe it’d convince me even further that it’s time to change.