Click to Enlarge For those of you who want to make "Sky Stitches" using Photoshop CS2 or CS3, the automatic Photomerge tool works great most of the time. But not always. Because clouds and sky are nebulous, not solid, Photomerge and have a hard time finding anchors to align the two photos. It also often tries to correct distortion, resulting in some loss of the image area. The "long" way in Photoshop always works because the user is in control. We use blend the images using layers and layer masks as follows:
If you shot in RAW make sure that both the land and the sky image are processed in the RAW converter exactly the same, so both images match in exposure, contrast, and color. Open both images in Photoshop. Select the foreground photo and increase the canvas size in height by 200%, making sure to set the anchor point for the canvas as the middle square in the bottom row (see screenshot1,above). Select the sky image and use the move tool to drag the sky image roughly over the landscape image. Go into the layers window and reduce the opacity of the sky layer to 50%. Use the move tool to change the position of the upper layer so that it closely aligns in the zone that will be blended with the land layer. Look for edges of clouds as clues to help you align. Don't worry if other parts of the images (like the horizon line) are not in exact alignment -- only the bottom layer's horizon will show in the final result. Change the opacity of the upper layer back to 100%. With the sky layer active, create a layer mask (Layer > Layer Mask > Reveal All). Look at your tool palette and make sure that the foreground color is set to black. If the color isn't black then type D (for default colors) followed by X (foreground/background color toggle) to get black as the foreground. Pick a large soft-edged brush (F5 to access the brush palette; see screenshot2, bottom left), and simply paint over the seam of the two photographs until the seam disappears. If you make a mistake, change the color in the tool palette back to white and paint away any errors. Once you have the sky blended between the two layers the way you want, flatten the image (Layer > Flatten Image) and crop away any excess canvas using the crop tool. See finished stitch (below right) to see a square stitch we made in this way. Do your standard digital darkroom finishing on the image -- we do mostly Curves and Levels adjustments and some local tonal adjustments.
Samantha Chrysanthou gave up her lucrative career as a lawyer to pursue her passion for writing and photography. See more of her work at chrysalizz.smugmug.com. Darwin Wiggett gave up his low-paying job as a research biologist for the even less lucrative job of full-time nature photographer. Check out his website at www.darwinwiggett.com.
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