Macro Stitching a Moth - Final Result

This panorama of Oleander Hawk-moth is by using 5 macro photos. In this tutorial I will use Adobe Photoshop CS4 which has greatly improved panorama tools, to produce this macro panorama. This version makes stitching odd photos so much easier than any other program I know of. If you notice these photos are not sequential like the normal pano shots we take. I took this way just to check the capability of Adobe Photoshop CS4 in identifying various segments. You will notice first two shots are of right and left wing, then three shots are of the body from top to bottom. This sort of mixed arrangement stumped most stitching applications out there.

My earlier favorite was PTGUI. When I tried it with these photos it failed miserably to recognize control points. The resulting panorama was a horrible mess. Adobe Photoshop CS4 excels in the aspect of recognition of various segments in the photos.

I was trying to photograph without tripod that day. My Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro was not able to get the full moth at 1:1 magnification. I used 20mm Kenko extension tube along with 100 mm and photographed the moth in 5 pieces with the intention of stitching together later.

I had to make sure that background was as clutter less as possible. This was easy as it was quite dark outside and I was using my Canon MT-24EX macro twin light flash so that background would be dark.

Next thing I wanted to make sure that there will be at least 20% overlap of parts in each photo, otherwise Photoshop will find it difficult to stitch them together.

Macro Stiching a Moth - Select Files

Once I imported the photos to Adobe Lightroom I selected these 5 shots and chose Edit in Photoshop as panorama.

Macro Stitching a Moth - Send to Photoshop

After churning out a bit, Photoshop CS4 produced this beautiful image of the Oleander moth all stitched together.

Macro Stitching a Moth - Panorama on Photoshop

I flattened all the layers and filled the transparent area with black around the moth. I also cropped and rotated to get this final result in Photoshop. So what we have at the end is around 100 mega pixel image of moth which is perfectly stitched and exposure blended. You can see this image at the beginning of this post.

If only I had tripod handy that day, I would have used macro focusing rail and could have taken several shots using canon MP-E 65mm 1x-5x macro and produced 1000 mega pixel monster photo ha ha, I was just joking

Anyway it was fun to try this panorama like stitching using macro that too with shots which were hand held. Photoshop CS4 has really improved its method of Photomerge and produces seamless stitching with excellent results. I hope this small tutorial helps many macro shooters out there who find their subject too big to fit in one frame

Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended

New Adobe Photoshop CS4 has just been released (23rd Sep 2008). Even though it looks similar to CS3 there are lot of improvements. It has nicely evolved from CS3 incorporating quite a few new features. Here are few features I liked in Adobe Photoshop CS4.

Adjustment Panel

To make work flow easier Adobe Photoshop CS4 now adds not just existing core adjustment features such as Levels, Hue/Saturation, Exposure, Black and White, Channel Mixer, Selective Color, Color Balance, Photo Filter, but a completely revised version of the Curves feature and a brand new Vibrance adjustment tool. All of them are now presented in a single panel which will provide both efficiency and quality gains way beyond the effort needed to get over the initial hump in the CS4 learning curve.

Graphic card powered display
Photoshop CS4 makes use of the awesome power of the modern graphics card to help display pixels on screen. Users with graphics card containing at least 256Mb of on board memory and a supported GPU will be able to take advantage of the changes which include:

• Fluid Canvas Rotation
• Smooth Accurate Pan and Zoom functions
• Animated Zoom and Toss (carrousal view) functions

Content Aware Scaling Before

Masks Panel
This new panel has dedicated sliders for altering the density and feather of a mask which in turn will change the strength of the masked effect and the softness of the mask’s edge. The powerful Refine Edge feature can also be accessed from the panel, along with the Invert feature that switches masked and unmasked areas.

Mask Panel

Content Aware Scaling feature
You can now push and pull different image parts around the canvas and have Photoshop fill in the gaps. It is now possible to move, stretch and resize different sections of your photo at different rates. This is drastically different from the Free Transform command, which when used in conjunction with the Shift key always resizes all picture content at the same rate. The image is scaled by keeping detailed areas the same and up or downsizing the parts of the photo that are feature less.

Content Aware Scaling After

Maximum depth of field
The layer auto-blending options in Photoshop gets an extra mode designed to combine photos of the same scene but with different focus points to create an image with extreme depth of field (DOF). The result displays the visual sharpness from the very front of the scene right into the distance. Using this new feature you can capture a series of images of a subject with a wide aperture, that typically produces a shallow depth of field effect, and combine the results to create a photo that combines the DOF of all source photos. This feature automatically color corrects the source files while blending as well.

Auto- Blending

Improved Photomerge
The feature can now create 360 degree panoramas, automatically detect source images taken with fisheye lenses and has a new Collage option which allows for rotation and scaling of source files as they are being montaged.

Adobe Camera Raw 5.0
Looking identical to the Lightroom 2.0 featurewise the new camera raw 5.0 gets the two key very popular localized adjustment tools found in Lightroom, the Adjustment Brush and Graduated Filter. Also new for this release is the ability to apply Vignetting changes to images after they have been cropped in ACR. This solves the problem of applying aesthetic darkening of a photos edge to only have the effect cropped, or worse, partially removed when the photo is cropped.

Integration with Lightroom 2.0
Now you can freely pass your Raw photos between Lightroom, Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop with the changes being respected in each program. Lightroom 2.0 also includes more ways to pass photos to Photoshop. You now have the option to open a Lightroom managed file in Photoshop as an embedded Smart Object. You can also pass a series of photos to the Merge to HDR or Photomerge features.

Dodge, Burn and Sponge tools
Burn and Dodge get a new Protect Tones option designed to reduce the muddiness that plagued so much of their work previously. The Sponge tool comes back with the addition of a Vibrance switch which converts from making basic saturation changes to concentrating adjustments on pastel or desaturated colors.

Live Preview Cursor Tips
The Clone Stamp and Healing Brush now display a preview of the sampled image at the cursor tip. This provided the user with much needed visual information when trying to line up sampled image parts with background information during stamping actions.

Transformation of Smart Objects
In CS4 you can now apply Perspective transformations to a Smart Object. There is the ability to work with linked layer masks and sample the content of the layers within the Smart Object with the new Eyedropper tool.

3D Editing and Compositing
The new and enhanced 3D tools found in Photoshop CS4 Extended are designed to work with 3D images just as easily as the 2D pictures. New workflows allow you to interact directly with 3D models and easily composite these models within 2D scenes. Users are now able to edit properties such as lights, materials and cameras, and in the process create high quality rendered images thanks to a new ray-tracing engine.

Enhanced Multimedia Capabilities
CS4 Extended increases the ease with which videographers are able to drag motion based images into Photoshop and provides them with more of the type of tools they need to work on these frames. Photoshop can now work more easily with non-square pixels, any audio associated with video footage, and it is also possible to animate 3d objects, camera position, render settings and even cross-sections.