From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

Combining two frames

From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

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Combining two frames

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- [Instructor] Hello friends, this is Chris Orwig and welcome to another episode of Photo Tools Weekly. In this week's episode, we will look at how we can use Photo Merge and how we can use that to combine multiple images together to get a better composition, because sometimes what happens in photography is this, I was photographing a professional skateboarder on a rooftop in Los Angeles and you can see there's this really beautiful ramp and there's the skateboarder, but he isn't really doing anything in this frame, but the composition is good. What he is about to do is to drop in and then go over here and do a little trick off the top. In the next image you can see that I got the moment of the trick but I shifted my perspective and so my composition isn't very good. So what I want to do is I want to fix that by combining these two images together. Now you can access Photo Merge inside of Lightroom but we don't want to do that, the reason is is that if you use Photo Merge here, you merge as a panorama it'll help you to bring the two images together, but you won't really have control with what it keeps or what it doesn't keep. What you want to do instead is go over to Photoshop and in Photoshop we can go to the File pulldown menu, choose Automate and then select that same tool, Photomerge right there so we click on that, it says Photomerge... remember whenever you see dots it's going to take you to another menu. Here we'll do the autolayout and I'm just going to browse to where I have these two images. I'll select those, click Open there, so I've selected the two images that I want to combine together, want to blend those images together and then I'll click OK. Now after you click OK, you sit back and Photoshop does some of its magic and basically what it's doing here is it's thinking that you're kind of trying to create a panoramic image, at which in a sense I'm doing because I'm combining two photographs together, but really I'm doing this for compositional purposes, not to create a certain type of a pano image. And so you can see here it figured out how to blend these two images together like this, obviously when you use the Photo Merge commands you need to crop the image, so I'm going to go ahead and crop to just recompose because I want to get really close to the action there and have this nice scene. Alright great so I have this, which I couldn't have really done myself very easily and the reason is is because the angle of the two shots was a little bit off and so it just figured out how to blend those together seamlessly and take the best of each side of either image and gave me some really good results. Now of course I have two versions of the guy, that could interesting if he was doing a trick on this side but in this case he isn't, so I just need to get rid of that. The way we'll do that is New Layer, and I'll go ahead and name this new layer cloning. Press the S key for my clone stamp tool and the way we use this as you know is Option or Alt, click to set your source area and then move your cursor over to where you want to begin to use that and then just begin to paint away. Now I'm just painting small little brushstrokes so I can remove my guy here and then Option or Alt click to set my source area once again and then paint the rest of him in a way, we can keep doing this, you probably want to do this from both sides, so do a little bit over here from this side too. Now that guy is gone, now we have a much better composition with this scene where we have the moment that we needed plus the entire skateboard ramp, the LA skyline in the background and that is working and we were able to accomplish that really without a lot of effort, that's the beautiful thing about working with Photo Merge. Alright well I hope you enjoyed this week's episode, I'll see you next time have a great rest of your day, bye for now.

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