I’m an artist. I have a long painting I scanned in three parts on my scanner. It has a lot of white space (which needs to be kept intact, because of the small amounts of color involved and visible paper texture), and when I try to use the automated “put these images together” function of Photoshop the program gets confused by all the white, and doesn’t do it right. I’m sure there must be a way to do this manually, but my googling isn’t producing it.
This is a photo of the painting, so you can see what I’m talking about. I’m using CS3.
I’m not great with photoshop, but I’m sure there is a way to do this. Help?
You could always create a large photoshop document, paste those images in, and manually align them.
Also, you could take a series of photos with ~30-40% overlapping between them with a relatively high resolution camera (a DSLR would be ideal but you could make do with any old camera).
After that, use File > Automate > Photomerge with Auto Layout, or if Auto doesn’t work with the manual layout options.
Before doing either of these you’ll want to fix any vignetting (darkening around the edges/corners) and distortion produced by your lens/camera (easiest to do with adobe’s camera raw which comes in photoshop, but you could do it manually too).
That’s a very nice painting btw, reminds me of the concept artwork for the Metal Gear Solid series.
To add to eltro102’s suggestion, which is basically correct, here is how to do it a little more specifically - let’s say that each of your 3 images is 1000 x 1000 pixels (meaning that the full painting would be 1000 x 3000). Create a 1000 x 3000 blank photoshop PSD file. Save it under a new name. Open the first of your scans, copy it, and then paste it into the main PSD file. Then, create a new layer in that main PSD. Open the second scan, paste it into that new layer. Create a third layer, paste the third scan into that. Now you have three “blocks” of image that you can shift minutely around (by selecting each layer separately) until you have it the way you want it.
It should be relatively easy to combine them using eltro102’s first method: Just make a new photoshop image that’s as wide as all the images combined, and then paste each section as a new layer and drag them into place.
Vignetting and distortion should be minimal if you’re using a scanner instead of a camera, so you probably don’t even have to deal with that.
It should be a pretty quick thing to do, so if you want to email the sections to me (click my name) I can also do it for you.
Thanks, guys. I’m messing with it now. I haven’t tried this in a while (I did the painting and scans about a year ago, then gave up when the auto-stitch method didn’t work.) I’d forgotten how un-intuitive working with Photoshop is.
There does seem to be a tiny bit of vignetting with the scans. How do I fix that? I appreciate the help. I need to get more proficient with this program.
The auto-stitch program I use lets you manually identify some features which are shared, to prevent the software from getting confused. Does Photoshop not have that, or is it still getting confused even with that?
Thanks everyone. My computer is acting stupid tonight and I don’t feel like trying to fix it right now, so I’ll get back to it tomorrow. I appreciate the help. And the complement, eltro.
If the scans aren’t absolutely straight with each other, the first thing to do is to choose an edge (of the image, maybe, or of the paper if that’s visible) and make it absolutely horizontal in each of the scans.
If there’s any overlap amont the three scans, temporarily change the transparency of the layer on top to 50% or so. That way you can nudge it back and forth one pixel at a time with the arrow keys and align it down to the pixel. Then just change transparency back to 100% and Flatten Layers when finished.
Another thing that might aid in either automatic or manual stitching. Place a small piece of blue painters masking tape in the white areas at the top and bottom with cross-hairs drawn on them. Editing out the tape when done combining the images will be trivial.
Presuming you are certain the tape won’t damage the media of course.
Find the Ruler Tool in the tools palette. Stretch it so that each end is at points you want aligned flat. Choose “Image / Rotate Canvas / Arbitrary” and it will already be set to the angle of the ruler. Click “OK” and it will automatically rotate it to straight.
Don’t you have to hold Ctrl to nudge/move layers? Changing the blend mode to “Difference” might make positioning easier. I would use Free Transform to rotate, since you can enter specific angles to 0.1 degree, and you can compare the result before committing.
You might also try your luck with the free Microsoft Image Composite Editor. It’s similarly automatic, but uses a different compositing algorithm that may or may not have better luck with your images. Worth a shot.
