Auto-aligning oversized illustrations

So now that I've got my image scanned in, I need to go ahead and assemble them. And there's a great feature in Photoshop that's going to help me do that. Now the first thing I'm going to do is get all of these images into the same file. And these croquis were drawn for me by a recent graduate of mine by the name of Gina Hahn. Thanks, Gina. So I'm going to go ahead and click on this first one, and drag it in over here. Click on this one and drag it into this file. Whoop! Come on, there we go.

And now, I'm going to go ahead and close these other two. So now I've got one file open on my screen, and you'll notice that there are three layers in this file. Each of my scanned pieces. Something that you have to consider is in order for this to work it's important to have enough overlap between the scanned pieces. So the number of pieces doesn't matter but that there's at least a 40% overlap does or this won't work. So now I'm going to to select all the layers I'll start by clicking on the top layer hold the Shift key, click on the background layer and now we're going to go up to Edit > Auto Align Layers, and let Photoshop do it's work for us.

I'm going to use the auto setting and click OK. And Photoshop when and assembled all the pieces for us, and it made the canvas bigger to accomodate the entire image, which is great. But, there are still a few things that could stand to be smoothed out, and actually, in this particular one, not that much. But I'm going to show you how to do this anyway. While you still have all three layers selected, back to Edit > Auto Blend Layers. And we want the default setting, which is Panorama.

Click OK. And this is going to go ahead and smooth out anything that might not have aligned perfectly, and if there were color imperfections it's going to clean that up for you a little bit. You'll notice now when we look at our layers panel there are three layers. And, each of them has a layer mask. And that's a lot more information than we need at this point. One layer with my drawing will be fine and I don't need the layer masks. So I'm going to go up to Layer > Merge Layers. And that's going to merge everything into one layer and get rid of the layer masks.

The only thing left to do now is crop and rotate my image. And then we can clean it up. So we'll click on the crop tool, and I'll go ahead and crop this closer, because there's no need for all that extraneous paper. And I'm going to go ahead and rotate. You'll notice if I get up near the top of my image, I get this double-headed arrow, and by clicking and dragging on my image with that, I can rotate the image to get my girls to be straight up and down. And I think we'll drag that in just a bit more and click the little check mark up on top.

And now I'm cropped and assembled and ready to clean up my image.