3.6. Stage 6

3.6.1. Retouching tools

The settings for the selection and retouching tools vary with the resolution. Here they apply to pictures taken from film scanned at about 3000 dpi.

I now had to deal with the facetted curve, which I would smooth by flattening its angles. The Liquify command is ideal when you want to work quickly, but it degrades the image too much, so I used another technique. Using the Lasso with a 1.3- pixel feather, I drew a triangle that included part of the horizon line. I converted my selection into a layer (Ctrl-J), brought up the Transform bounding box (Ctrl-T), and moved its rotation axis to the point of the triangle. Luckily, there happened to be a small sail right there, and it hid the new angle produced when I pivoted this portion of the horizon downward.

I repeated this same operation on the adjacent shot on the right so the two segments would match. Enough of the ugly angle had disappeared to give the illusion of a real curve.

Once these small triangular layers were merged, I corrected the texture on their outlines so they blended perfectly. The Patch tool is excellent for this. I also used the Clone Stamp tool, but I had to fiddle with the point's hardness and master diameter settings from the Brush dropdown that appears on Photoshop's options toolbar. (A 100% hardness setting leaves marks; at 0%, the texture becomes blurry; and 50% isn't a good compromise if you want to preserve the grainy quality of the photo.) Ideally, the setting should be hard, but not leave any marks. You have to create it, test it, and refine it with the Brush Tip Shape settings in the Brush Presets palette.

The panorama assembly was finished; now I had to clean up the seams between the pictures and populate the scene. Oddly enough, joining the images of the sky was the most troublesome. There weren't any clouds, so I didn't have any varied textures to hide the retouching flaws. Photoshop's Healing Brush and Patch tools would have been very effective, but they require that the layers be merged.

Since I wasn't going to flatten the image until the last moment, I decided to use the layer masks. This works just as well as the Healing Brush and Patch tools, and might even be faster. I reshaped their edges by alternating between the Eraser and the Brush, using my personal wide-diameter presets. Even when the brightness difference between two layers was very slight, I did my best to adjust it.

Having finished the corrections in the sky, I then turned to the sea, and was glad I had overlapped the shots so generously. As a result, sails and waves often looked like they'd been chopped off by the line between two layers created by the mask. But the rest of the underlying images were there.

I revealed the rest of the images by erasing relevant parts of the masks using the Eraser and the Brush tools at 100% opacity.