Merging Two Photos In CS2?

[mikeschmeee]

Hello,

I am in need of some help/advice/tips/whatever else you want to call it.
I have two photos, one with a longer exposure then the other but not by much. It's a photo of the sunrise over the city. One photo has more colour then the other from the sun and clouds. The second photo has less sunlight but more lights from the city. I want to some how combine the photos together so I have some nice red, orange and purple/blue from the sun and clouds while still having the lights from the city buildings.

I've been googling for a bit but still not sure if I am doing this correctly. Maybe I should be using some different type of process? I've tried "stitching" the photos together but there is one small issue. I accidently zoomed out a tad on one of the photos so I'm constantly using the free transform tool to scale it down accordingly but it doesn't match up. I'll get too much blur from the buildings and a few trees over lapping.

I'm pretty sure I have to rescale both images to a certain size before I can stitch them together? Not sure what to do here and its a bit hard to explain as I am not the greatest at photoshop talk. hah.
I just want the right colours in the photo or else I have to take this photo again for the 6th time.

Hopefully I am posting in the right section of the forum

Thanks in advance.
Mike

 

[Kwill]

1. Yes, you should get the photos the same size. I would advise converting one to Smart Object* and then set layer to Difference. Scale that layer until image appears completely black. Then set layer to normal and rasterize it.
2. The effect you are going for is called HDR. (Google "hdr photoshop tutorial.")
3. File > Merge to HDR in Ps CS3.**

* Reason for Smart Object is to maintain optimum fidelity during rescaling -- particularly if you need to adjust several times. Also this allows slight incremental percentage adjustments to transform scaling.

** I have Ps CS (feature absent) and CS3 (feature present). I am uncertain if feature is available in CS2.

 

[mikeschmeee]

Thanks! I'll look into that. I'm not sure if this falls under the category of HDR, I've seen many HDR photos and they seem as if one drew the photo with pastels and I thought if one wants to do a HDR photo they would use a program called photomatrix. Has to do something with tone mapping?
Anyways, thanks! I'll try it out and see if that works. If not I'm going to retake that darn photo again! aaarhg!

 

[mvbroadhurst]

merge pics

which 2 pics do you want to merge?

 

[mikeschmeee]

Don't know if this is the correct term to be using but I'm trying to "merge" these two photos. I've been playing around and the buildings just don't match up! I'm really kicking myself in the rear for zooming in slightly when taking the photo.. aarrgh!

 

[panoz7]

How's this? I used automate - photomerge to align the images, placed the darker one on top, and created a layer mask using the channel mixer. Seemed to work well enough, though the images may have been too small to see errors that would be present were the same technique applied to the originals.

 

[Kwill]

Don't give up. Try various blend modes in the Layers palette.

 

[mikeschmeee]

How's this? I used automate - photomerge to align the images, placed the darker one on top, and created a layer mask using the channel mixer. Seemed to work well enough, though the images may have been too small to see errors that would be present were the same technique applied to the originals.

That's the result I'm pretty much after. Just the city lights in with the sunrise colours. The images I showed you guys are smaller sizes then what I am working with. Full resolution for both are roughly 2990 x 4417.

Thanks for the help everyone I'll play around with it again tonight after work.

 

[mvbroadhurst]

blending

hi mike - give me an email address and i'll send you a low res file set up for masking with basic instructions if you haven't done it before - cheers...M

 

[mikeschmeee]

Done and done! mikeschmeee@gmail.com
Thank you!

 

[mikeschmeee]

I still have no clue what I'm doing here. I tried using photomerge and the photo is completely off. I think I need step by step instructions. lynda.com style haha

 

[mikeschmeee]

Alright, I think I know what to do here but I need to resize the photos so they are properly aligned. I can't get it to align though the rest is easy as pie. I really wish I didn't zoom in! aaargh!