6/23/10

Photoshop CS5 and a relaxing day at the lake

Sunset at Lake Kerr
Yikes! The weeks have flown by... 
Adobe Photoshop CS5 was launched a few weeks ago and I am very happy I upgraded. Installation was uneventful and the new software is relatively bug free running on OSX 10.6.3 Snow Leopard. No show stopping bugs so far. Take the new Photoshop tool demos with a grain of salt. Like any photo demo, they were careful when picking which images to feature. Content Aware Fill can make a wonderful mess of a fill as well as save lots of time on a different shot. Adobe has already released maintenance upgrades to CS5 and, especially of interest to photographers, Camera Raw 6.1 with lens correction. You will need CS5 to use Camera Raw 6.1. Lens distortion correction and improved noise reduction are just a few of the great improvements.

Last weekend I didn't want to mess with multiple lenses at a lake party. The 70-200mm telephoto zoom worked great most of the day until I saw this huge sunset. Don't forget you can stitch multiple shots together with software like Photoshop to make a panoramic image when you can't get everything to fit in the viewfinder. Panos are not limited to making a wide horizontal image. This sunset is a combination of five hand-held overlapping shots processed with CS5's Photomerge. That sure beat swapping lenses in a light rain. -pw

1 comment:

Paul Ware said...

I was asked via facebook how the shots overlapped. Here's more detail on the shooting process for this tall pano.

The camera was held normal for a horizontal shot. Starting with the sun rays, I panned down for each consecutive shot overlapping the previous shot so the software could easily find reference points when combining the images. It's best to set the camera to Manual mode, including the focus. You don't want the camera automatically adjusting for the changes in the scene lighting, color temperature and distance as you pan. Treat the sequence like you are shooting one photo.