Photoshop tip: Photomerge

This weekend was the most beautiful Autumn Sunday and Rudi armed with our simple 4.0 megapixel Camera (Canon Powershot G3), took some photos of the fantastic colours. He used Photoshops Automate>Photomerge to stitch together a poster. (Can't remember how many pixels, but the image was 2 metres by 72 cm at 150ppi).

You can also use Lightroom 2.0 but, Lightroom does need Photoshop's help. Select the photos, go to Photo-Menu>Edit in>Merge to Panorama in Photoshop.

I asked him how many photos he had used and he started to count 1,2,3,4 … 21. I was really impressed. Told him to post it in his blog, upload the colours to Kuler, sell it to Ikea as a door poster etc. etc. etc.
While he was working on his blog, he calls me over and shows me this. An unbelievable photo of Yosemite National Park by Gerard Maynard. He created a 17 gigapixel image using 2000 photos. (Ikea door poster? This could line the Chunnel [tunnel from UK to France]. But he did have to work on a 96,5 Gigabyte document and admits himself that he does have the equipment to do so.

"I have a bunch of RAID systems, so I'm moving data at about 300 MB second," Maynard said. "It takes about 45 minutes to an hour just for one of the large images to load into Photoshop. With a conventional drive, it'd take about two to three hours."

Before you can see the photo you will have to sit through a (few seconds) Obama campaign commercial. Not a problem for me.
Click on the zoomify link. This function is now also available in Photoshop.Click here to see Gerard Maynards photo of Yosemite and for a panorama of Harlem New York. You can almost see the people in their apartements.

Impressive as they, are I'm still proud of Rudi's work and will continue bragging about him anyway. Off to give Ikea a call ;-)