8.6. Stage 6

8.6.1. Post-production

I opened the images in Photoshop separately. The enormous advantage of working with multi-layered files that include layer masks is that you can manipulate the photographs without modifying the pixels.

A layer mask is a grayscale image. Everything that's painted black is masked; everything that's painted white will show through. By adjusting my brush's opacity and the percentage of gray, I could subtly change the degree of transparency. The principle is the same whether you are "resurrecting" or "burying" a detail.

I first worked on the ghostly passersby walking along the dock. I located the layer with the man in the dark coat, and clicked the thumbnail of its layer mask in the Layers palette. From then on, I worked in grayscale mode. The foreground and background colors disappeared in the Tools palette, leaving only black and white.

I chose a soft Brush shape, set its opacity to 50%, and used it to paint on the layer mask. I wanted to increase the picture's opacity, so I used white. As I gradually painted over the character's legs, the area I wanted to see began to appear.

I usually prefer to work at 50% opacity. This forces me to paint twice as many brushstrokes, of course, but it has the advantage of letting me work gently, thereby preserving the naturalness of the overlay.

Refining the pictures was a matter of manipulating the Brush tool and working in grayscale (thanks to the layer masks), without modifying a single pixel on the images.

I have to admit that dealing with the water reflections was pretty tedious. The number of reflections (and their complexity) made it hard to create areas that made sense visually. Yet all of my panorama's realism depended on this painstaking work, so every detail took on enormous importance. Of the four hours I spent in Photoshop, nearly three were devoted just to fixing the reflections! And the size and weight of the images didn't let me work very quickly.

If you're likewise dealing with elephantine images, crop the image and just work on that section. Select the desired area and crop the picture (Image→Crop), being careful to save it with a different file name. Once you finish your modifications, open the original file and stick the cropped copy you've worked on over the original selected area. This trick lets you work on huge files even on an underpowered computer.

Having eliminated the artifacts, I then moved on to the nadir—the troublesome picture of the ground.

Because I hadn't assembled the nadir in Stitcher, the program exported an image with a blank hole in the middle. I now imported the nadir picture, reduced the layer's opacity to about 70%, and manually transformed it so it matched the main image. After a few modifications, I refined the transformation by using Edit→Transform→Distort.

I had to be very careful in placing the nadir shot.

I slid that layer under all the others. I could have used the layer masks on the upper layers to erase my tripod, had it been visible in the nadir picture.

I tweaked the color by creating a Curves adjustment layer (Layer→ New Adjustment Layer→Curves) and worked on the layer mask, carefully erasing any remaining seams.