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Adobe Photoshop CS3 Tutorials
Layers / Auto Align Layers
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Photoshop CS3 / Layers / Auto Align Layers)
New to Photoshop CS3 is a great feature called auto align that lives under our edit menu and as you see here its right here. But of course it's ghosted out because we have to first of all have two layers to auto align and then we're gonna use auto blend. Now as you see here in my office I took a picture of some action figures, I have Darth Mall from Star Wars and I have a skull because I like skulls and Darth Mall is not paying attention. He's so focused on getting all Jedi he's not even paying attention to the camera. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna shift drag this image right into this document. So I'm gonna hold down shift and drag him right over there and what that does is it puts it right in the center. Now I'm gonna go ahead and hide that because we don't need this. Now I'm gonna take out the layers and let's take a look at what we have here. So here's the first layer, here's the second layer. Alright you'll notice there is a discrepancy in even the camera position, so the camera is up in one position and the camera is down as well as Darth Mall who is looking in once direction in one shot and looking in another direction in the other. So what we are gonna do is we are going to shift, select both of these layers and then we are gonna return to the edit menu and we are gonna go to auto align layers. Then we had a dialog box and we have some options as to how we want this filter work. Generally with two images, auto works fine but you can also choose if you have more then one image to use perspective cylindrical to fix some kind of lens distortion in your camera and to try to get a nice accurate panorama and you can also use reposition only. So Photoshop will just go ahead and try its best to put everything back together which pretty much is what auto will do for you as well. But auto is gonna try to do everything for you. So I'm gonna say OK and as you see in this dialog box it's going to align these images, it's gonna take a little while to do that. So we'll wait a moment, alright its done. I'll hide the first layer and look at the difference, their pretty much aligned. But what we want to do is we want to choose which head we want to keep in position here so I might want to add a layer mask so I can hide one of these heads so I can have Darth Mall looking in the same direction. It's a skull for example or vice versa. So what I'm gonna do now I'm gonna go to edit, auto blend the layers and then what Photoshop is gonna try to do is try to match the lighting and everything as best it can. And its gonna blend the uh, tonal qualities in both images here so we give that a moment as well. OK and what we also get is a layer mask in both of these layers. For this particular exercise I don't need the bottom layer mask so I am going to right click and delete this layer mask and I'm gonna focus on this one here. Then I'm gonna grab my brush and what you'll see is when I move my mouse I can paint as long as the color is white so I can change how this head interacts with the head underneath it. So I'm gonna hit X on my keyboard and now watch this, how cool is that, I can paint away the old head and reveal the skull which has been aligned with the new head facing in the direction that I want him to look in which is away from the camera or I could swap the layers and put the mask on this layer and have Darth Mall facing the same direction as the skull. Either or as you can see these functions work in an amazingly accurate way. So it matches the pixels, it tries to match the lighting to provide you with the layer mask that you can then use to paint away parts of the image to hide what you don't want to see so you can reveal the objects that you do want to see in the layer beneath it.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Photoshop CS3 |
| Author: | Dwayne Ferguson |
| SKU: | 33782 |
| ISBN: | 1-933736-98-4 |
| Release Date: | 2007-08-02 |
| Duration: | 9 hrs / 161 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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