Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook

3.8. Stage 8

3.8.1. Reality or imagination?

Once I finished the retouching, I merged the eight layers so I could make overall adjustments. In general, I like to adjust the color and brightness of the sky independently of the rest of the picture. First, I selected the sky and saved the selection with a 0-pixel feather, then shrank it by 3 pixels and applied a 2-pixel feather.

I applied the Filter→Noise→Dust & Scratches filter with a radius of 3 pixels and varied the threshold from 11 to 20, depending on how much I wanted to soften the grain in the sky. (Cloud texture requires a threshold of about 13.)

I then retrieved the 0-pixel sky selection, inverted it, shrank it by 2 pixels, and gave it a 3-pixel feather. Turning to the sea, I applied the Unsharp Mask filter with an Amount ranging between 90 and 130, a radius of 0.8 pixels for fine grain, and as much as 4 pixels when I wanted to emphasize something. The threshold was set at 4 levels to keep artifacts from appearing in the shadow areas.

My panorama was starting to look pretty good. I made the final color and brightness adjustments, working on the sky and the sea separately. Then I shrank their selections by 2 pixels with a 2-pixel feather, so that borders wouldn't appear along the line between air and water.

The beach still seemed strangely empty, however, which didn't correspond to reality. I solved the problem by importing and carefully positioning more windsurfers and paragliders from my other pictures. If the figures looked ...