Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook

8.6. Stage 6

8.6.1. Post-production

I opened the images in Photoshop separately. The enormous advantage of working with multi-layered files that include layer masks is that you can manipulate the photographs without modifying the pixels.

A layer mask is a grayscale image. Everything that's painted black is masked; everything that's painted white will show through. By adjusting my brush's opacity and the percentage of gray, I could subtly change the degree of transparency. The principle is the same whether you are "resurrecting" or "burying" a detail.

I first worked on the ghostly passersby walking along the dock. I located the layer with the man in the dark coat, and clicked the thumbnail of its layer mask in the Layers palette. From then on, I worked in grayscale mode. The foreground and background colors disappeared in the Tools palette, leaving only black and white.

I chose a soft Brush shape, set its opacity to 50%, and used it to paint on the layer mask. I wanted to increase the picture's opacity, so I used white. As I gradually painted over the character's legs, the area I wanted to see began to appear.

I usually prefer to work at 50% opacity. This forces me to paint twice as many brushstrokes, of course, but it has the advantage of letting me work gently, thereby preserving the naturalness of the overlay.

Refining the pictures was a matter of manipulating the Brush tool and working in grayscale (thanks to the layer masks), without modifying a single pixel on the images. ...