Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook

3.7. Stage 7

3.7.1. The heart of the matter

As I worked my way down the picture, the appearance of the sea changed more and more, and the disparities between overlapping pictures increased. Some waves now extended under the mask; others ended at the actual edge of the layer. There were several possible ways to deal with this. If the snippets or segments of wave weren't essential to the overall composition, I eliminated them with the Patch tool or left them where they were, hidden by the mask.

Otherwise, I found similar-looking waves in other pictures. I roughly selected them with the Lasso using a 2-pixel feather and brought them in, either whole or in part, depending on what needed to be recreated.

If an area was just too hard to fix, I didn't bother. I could always disguise it by placing a sail or a person there later.

In addition to the waves, the pattern of the sea itself was very changeable. I evened out the variations of light and texture on the water, but loosely and over larger areas. I would wait until I had flattened the image to fix any remaining mistakes with the Patch tool.

As I reworked all this material, I was inevitably moving away from reality. But although photography is malleable, it tends to retain its believability. There are aberrations in my panorama, but you don't notice them—and I'm not talking about optical distortion or the unusual mob of windsurfers. Look at the wave in the foreground that matches the horizon, for example. Notice how it somehow stretches ...