Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook

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 ...