On creating composite images

I have lately been obsessed with creating composite images of various things. I already posted a hand-made composite image of Parrish Hall (Swarthmore College), that took at least 3 hours to do. Here it is again.



All in all, I think it was a success. There is a problem with the precise alignment of the details, and some of the lines that should be straight are not. Besides that, the lighting varies among the images themselves.

Last Saturday I went to Kinkakuji (The Golden Pavilion Temple). The scenery was really beautiful, so I took a series of photos from one spot, looking out at the Golden Pavilion and the Mirror Pond.

Then came the interesting part. I wanted to create the composite picture the same way I did with the one of Parrish Hall. However, I soon understood that this would not be possible. Just importing the pictures made it clear that there would be too much disparity between the lighting and proportions.



To be honest, I didn't want to spend that much time on the image, and I knew that even if I did, the result might not be pleasant.

Then, lo and behold, I found out that Photoshop is pretty good at doing composite images all by itself! Here is the result:



I started off with 25 images of Kinkakuji, resized them so that they would be easier to process, then using the File>Automate>Photomerge option, I imported the images and let Photoshop do its job. The first resulting image was disappointing because the geometry was messed up. When I removed the awkwardly placed image from the set and ran Photomerge again, it came back with this beautiful picture.

The processing took close to 10 minutes, and Photoshop used up to 4GB of disk space, but I think it was totally worth it. The result is not perfect, as there are some spots where the transition is not seamless (look at the water on the lower left side of the image), but I think it is still worth it. And it is fully automated, so you don't even have to do much...

Here is a cropped version, which looks more like a panorama-type image.



Give panoramic compositions a try and let me know how it works.