Posts Tagged ‘scanning’

Photoshop – the Best Jig Saw Puzzle Solver

Source image for photo merge

I am working on a personal project to preserve as much of my photo history before everything fades away. My memory will not hold for very long either, I suspect! In some cases, there are some publications where my photos are used, and these larger formats are difficult to preserve digitally. Due to the size of some of these publications, it is not possible to capture the entire spread with one pass of the scanner which is only letter sized. To do this before was a very complicated puzzle-building process. I would have to scan as much of the newspaper-sized pages on the scanner in sections making many different parts that overlapped each other in content. Sometimes, I would have up to 8 different images depending on the size of the print. In this example, I only have 2 separate images:

Source image for photo merge
Source image for photo merge

Photo Merging

Source image for photo merge
Source image for photo merge

As can be seen in this example all the overlap between the text and the images on the page. In older versions of Photoshop, I would bring in both source images, and lay one on top of the other on a large empty background. Then I would reduce the opacity of the top layer, and maneuver it until the overlapping parts were right over each other on the layer below. It was time consuming, but it was possible. In the newer Photoshop versions, there is a nice automated way of doing this. First, open both images in Photoshop, then click on “File > Automate > Photomerge” which bring up this dialog box:

Photoshop CC Photomerge dialog box
Photoshop CC Photomerge dialog box

Click the Add Open Files button to add the open images to the process box. Make sure the box – Blend Images Together is selected, then click ‘OK’. Now Photoshop will quickly merge these two images using the overlapping information from each piece to create one large, merged document! This couldn’t be easier. I now only have to make sure that I have lots of overlapping areas from the large print. Knowing that the computer will do all of the aligning, you can scan in as many images as you would like. I have done this with up to 10 different images with no problem.

Large Merged Document
Large Merged Document

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703-864-8208

Best Gifts

I am so thankful for another great Christmas spent with family. There was so much good food to eat, and many gifts to exchange! Some of the best gifts are still related to photography. A new camera, or a new camera bag to hold all my stuff! Actually, I am enjoying going through some old photos. I sent a few of our old family slides out to be scanned. It takes a long time to do the scanning right, and the equipment can be hard to master.

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Luckily, there are lots of places that you can outsource this. Luckily they were able to complete the job in time before Christmas. It was nice to share the digitized images with family while we had some time to relax and go through them. These old images definitely have more meaning as time passes. This makes me appreciate even more the job of being a photographer to help preserve even better images for people if I have the gear and the knowledge to do so.

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I have plenty of personal images to go through after the scanning. These were all taken on slide film, so we did not see them as often as those that were taken with negative film, and then printed. These always stayed as slides and would only come out when my parents setup the projector, loaded them into trays, and displayed them on a projector screen. Sometimes we would look at them on a small slide viewer, but it was still rarer than looking through the prints. It has been fun to look at them again especially during the holidays.

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TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208