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

The other day, I found a Long horned beetle clinging to the siding of my house. I grabbed my trusty Canon 5D Mark II and a Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro lens and my Feisol tripod. As I could not get all the parts of this beetle in focus I remembered the auto-align and auto-blend trick I had seen in the new Adobe Photoshop CS4. Previously I had tried focus stacking using freeware combinez5 which produced fantastic results. On the web I could get quite a few video tutorials like this and this, explaining their technique but there was dearth of written tutorials with pictures. Probably it is easier nowadays to create a video tutorial and post. So here is my humble effort to show you how I did this. I recommend that you download the latest update of Adobe Photoshop CS4 11.0.1 which updates and improves the quality of the results of Auto-Blend Layers.

I shot this beetle which was sitting on a white dining mat. As the depth field at 1:1 macro setting was too shallow. I took 10 sequential shots maintaining same exposure settings on a tripod but just altering the point of focus little by little. I usually start from the nearest point which I try to be in sharp focus then try little further until I reach the last shot which has the farthest point in focus. Best method to do this is fix the focus on the lens and move the camera little by little forward and keep taking pictures of different focus points. This avoids the geometric distortion all together. Make sure while doing so you make sure that the exposure, speed as well as focus all are locked. This needs a real steady hand or a focusing rail connected to the tripod head.

If you don’t have them then you can try getting the shots by fixing the camera on the tripod and altering focus of the lens by adjusting manual focus ring. Auto focus is a big NO for this technique. Now with Adobe Photoshop CS4 you can easily correct the geometric distortion introduced by adjusting manual focus.

Export from Lightroom to Layers in Photoshop

My work flow involves Adobe Lightroom 2.3 which manages all my files on my hard disk. Once you import the files from your card, select all the files which need to be blended and choose the option of edit in > Open as Layers in Photoshop. The step is same if you are using Bridge instead of Lightroom. Now Lightroom exports all the files to Photoshop into a single Photoshop document with multiple layers. Each layer consists of a single image. Here I have 10 images of this beetle consisting of various areas of  sharp focus resulting in 10 layers in the Photoshop document.

Select All Layers in Photoshop

In Photoshop choose Select > All Layers.

Choose Auto-Align Layers

Then choose Edit > Auto-Align Layers. The Auto-Align Layers dialog box opens.

Auto-Align Layer Dialog Box

Note: The Auto-Align Layers dialog box has a default Lens Correction setting of Geometric Distortion. This setting gives you the option of compensating for geometric distortion. In addition, the default Projection setting is Auto. When Auto is selected, Photoshop finds and compensates for certain kinds of lenses based on meta data information.

After Auto-Aligning Layers

Now click OK to view the Auto-Aligned composition. Now all the images are perfectly aligned. You might notice the edges of the picture seems warped this is because Adobe Photoshop has now corrected the geometric distortion.

Auto-Blend Layers

With all Layers still selected choose Edit > Auto-Blend Layers.

Auto-Blend Layers Dialog Box

Select Stack Images from the Auto-Blend dialog box. Leave Seamless Tones And Colors selected.
Click OK.

If we had not done auto-align before doing the auto-blend then the geometric distortion would be there in these images. And that gives a strange halo effect near the edge of the beetle. So it is always advisable to run auto-align before auto-blend.

Auto-Blend Layers Progress

When you turn on the layers, you can see that the images now contain deep focus with all the points in focus.

Cropping in Photoshop

Now its time to crop the edge so that main image looks clean. It also gets rid of the warped edges. Now its time to save the image and get back to Adobe Lightroom to further process if necessary. I found many a times the resulting image needs some exposure correction which can be easily done in Adobe Lightroom. Now here is the final image as exported from Adobe Lightroom.

Hope this tutorial was helpful, please ask me any steps if you have found difficult to follow. Please enter your valuable comments so that I can improve on my tutorial.