Forums: Design:

I do this kind of thing fairly often but in a more hands-on way. I thought this was pretty darned impressive and automated:
jnack.com/adobe/photoshop/fountain/

Holy crap, that's AWESOME.

woah! good find mc!!

Originally posted by: arigato
Holy crap, that's AWESOME.

to add to the quality of the finished image,
one might consider taking one of the originals,
placing it atop the automated composite, aligning it

and then masking the layer completely to allow zooming in and painting on the mask [with white] to bring back in any detail that has been blurred by the Median blend

notice the water stream on the fountain, and I imagine the person in the red didn't hold still enough not to blur slightly... leaves in trees would also be a place where the masking could 'sharpen' the look of the composite



just some thoughts

holy!! that's very cool.

Good points, Walt and I'm sure I would but, day-um, he got 90% of the way there in no time.

p.s. I can never remember which forum to post things in.

Originally posted by: Walt

notice the water stream on the fountain...
just some thoughts

could be, if that is waht you want to do...

but, in the case of the example—I am afraid I carry the baggage of past discussion and examples where it was the people moving about that bothered the photographer


the trick has actually been used, dare I say developed, as a method for getting rid of low-light noise which is generated randomly by chips/sensors... so, two or three shots of the same subject, in low light, which have noise problems, treated in this manner will cancel out the noise [because it is random, and different from image to image]

in the case of the fountain, the people are noise

interesting on the noise reduction, I didn't know that - thanks for the tip!

thumbs up... good catch

one thing someone commented on today, this process works in the Extended version of Photoshop... for those using Photoshop CS3 Standard, when this process gets to the Smart Object Stack Mode selection, are you offered these options?

I have the Extended versions on both my machines & couldn't verify if this was 'universal'

I've used this technique, and variations on it, to varying degrees of success. When it works, it's awesome, when it doesn't, it's extremely frustrating, because I can't figure out what makes some work and what makes others not. I've even had the same stack of images work some and not work other times!

i must be using cs3 standard cause when i get to the smart objects/ stack mode, it's blanked out and non functional. that's weak. makes this whole thing almost useless if you can't get to the last step.

someone had been mentioning a script for averaging the layers once aligned...
yet, I don't know if the script would do better what I would do myself with a few quick layer masks


what the script does is basically what one would need to...
for doing the mean averaging manually,
by setting the opacity of each layer to 100 / LP, where LP
= Layer Position. That is, the bottom layer is in Layer Position One,
so it has 100 percent opacity, the next layer up is LP2, so is 50
percent, next is LP3, so it is 33 percent, etc.


I can shoot an email requesting the script if you would like it

hmm, i think the layer masks method would be fairly good here. couldn't use it as the noise trick, but i've done a similar variant of that script that loses the noise. also, noise ninja is a cool little plugin that does some nice things. i think the same can be done with some of the new blur filters though or unsharp mask.