Panoramas in CS5

canon400d

I have now upgraded to CS5 and I have followed the tutorial by Terry White on the new feature of doing panoramas in CS5. After selecting say three images to photomerge and then the panorama image appears. I select the magic wand tool and when I try to select the top piece of the image to fill in I find the marching ants are all over the place. I have tried Select inverse but makes no difference. When I select delete and the drop down box appears and click on 'content aware' the end product is obviously distorted because I have been unable to control the marching ants after selecting the magic wand tool.
I am sure this is a fantastic new feature in CS 5 if I could only get it to work properly.
Cheers
Bob

Nikolai

Try to merge the layers first. In fact, they are fairly useless "as is" anyways, so you won't luse much info because of the merge.

canon400d

Nikolai wrote: »

Try to merge the layers first. In fact, they are fairly useless "as is" anyways, so you won't luse much info because of the merge.

Yes I should have explained after merging the layers the full panorama appears. I then have to flatten the layers to get the Magic Wand tool to work. It is at this point I cannot control the marching ants.
Cheers
Bob

CWSkopec

Bob,
Can you post a sample of what the image looks like after you flatten the layers? I think that would help diagnose the problem... or at least rule out some possibilities.

canon400d

CWSkopec wrote: »

Bob,
Can you post a sample of what the image looks like after you flatten the layers? I think that would help diagnose the problem... or at least rule out some possibilities.

This is the photo I have been practising on. I took three images just to see if I could get it to work. The next step should be the Magic Wand tool and then have the marching ants to include the top on the image and the left side and the bottom of the image. If the marching ants had been running correctly the next step is Delete and then the drop down amd click on content aware and then it should end up with a complete full picture.
Cheers
Bob

pathfinder

Why not just crop the borders of your image, Bob, and skip the content aware step?

Or select all of your image with ctrl-A, and use Image Transform -> Warp to correct the pincushion appearance of your pano?

CWSkopec

Bob, Pathfinders suggestions might be your best bet (those are the options I go with most regularly), but I think that the root of your issue with not being able to control the marching ants is that the area you're trying to select is too close in color to the clouds in the sky.

You have a few options to get around this:

1) the magic wand has a tolerance that lets you decide how many similar shades will be selected. The default is usually 32 (I believe), and you should see the box to change it in your tool bar ( towards the left side). A smaller number will select fewer variations of the color you click on. So if you set the tolerance all the way down to 1 it should only select the purest white. Hopefully that's just the edges you're trying to get rid of, but if there's any blown out patches in your clouds they might get picked up too.

2) use the marque tool (for quick geometric shaped selections) or the lasso tool (for more refunded selections) to have a little more control over what gets selected. You will likely grab small parts of the image you want to keep with either of these tools, but in my experience, content aware fill does a nice job of replacing those parts and a little overlap can help make a smoother blend.

3) before you flatten the layers, those white areas should be transparent (shown as small gray & white checkboxes). It's when you flatten the layers that photoshop makes those areas white, which is what's difficult to select with the wand. So instead of flattening the layers, you can merge them. This will maintain the transparent background instead of adding the white (to do this, select all of the image layers in your layers panel, right click and select merge layers). Then, with the magic wand, click in one of the transparent areas. The trick here is that hitting the delete button won't bring up content aware fill option unless the image has been flattened. So instead hit shift+f5 (on a Pc at least, not sure about Macs) to bring up the content aware fill dialog box.

4) or, before you flatten your image, create a new layer and fill it with the worst color you can. I'm thinking hot pink, but any color that is not in your photos will work. Move the "hot pink" layer to the bottom in your layers panel. Now flatten the image. Photoshop won't add the white edges because you already have a layer ( the hot pink one) that fills the space. Then you can use the magic wand to select just the hot pink areas, hit delete and let photoshop fill them in.

Just an FYI, I'm writing this on my iPad and doing the best I can to write this from memory so I may have gotten a keystroke or something similar wrong. If I'm way off and you can't find what I'm talking about, let me know and I'll load up photoshop and double check myself.

Hope that helps!

Anthony

Bob, whilst the suggestions to crop this particular image are sound - in this instance - I appreciate you are trying to understand the process of selecting and 'content aware' filling blank areas after creating panoramas. Using the magic wand tool is just one way of selecting the area to be filled. I often use the lasso tool to select (in fact slightly over-select seems to work best) an area and then go under the EDIT menu, select FILL and click OK. You might try the various selection methods available in PS to see which works best in a given set of circumstances.

Anthony.

PS. I downloaded the picture you offered and tidied up the edges in four or five separate selections fairly well.

pathfinder

Bob, you are using the wrong tool to remove the white areas around your image with the Magic Wand. You want to use the Quick Select Tool. which is in the tool palette along with the Magic Wand.

I posted a thread here about swapping backgrounds, in which I described using the Quick Select Tool. I think you will find he Quick Select Tool is a much better choice for selecting the areas you want to delete, over the Magic Wand. After selecting with the Quick Select Tool, go to Refine Edges to really finish your selection so that there in no white or black margin to your selection.

If you select unwanted areas when you click with your Quick Select Tool, make your brush smaller with your right ] bracket key, hold down your option key, as you select the areas you want de-selected, and you can add and subtract from your selection quite quickly. Most of my simple selections take less than 60 seconds today with the Quick Select tool which you activate via the w key, just like the Magic Wand tool also.

I used the Quick Select Tool, while sitting in a workshop this weekend, to select the snake in an image for the drop down shadow. The selection took less than 2 minutes.

canon400d

pathfinder wrote: »

Why not just crop the borders of your image, Bob, and skip the content aware step?

Or select all of your image with ctrl-A, and use Image Transform -> Warp to correct the pincushion appearance of your pano?

Thanks Pathfinder. On an image like this I would do just that and crop it. But some pano images need more cropping than others and content aware seems to do the trick.
Cheers
Bob

canon400d

CWSkopec wrote: »

Bob, Pathfinders suggestions might be your best bet (those are the options I go with most regularly), but I think that the root of your issue with not being able to control the marching ants is that the area you're trying to select is too close in color to the clouds in the sky.

You have a few options to get around this:

1) the magic wand has a tolerance that lets you decide how many similar shades will be selected. The default is usually 32 (I believe), and you should see the box to change it in your tool bar ( towards the left side). A smaller number will select fewer variations of the color you click on. So if you set the tolerance all the way down to 1 it should only select the purest white. Hopefully that's just the edges you're trying to get rid of, but if there's any blown out patches in your clouds they might get picked up too.

2) use the marque tool (for quick geometric shaped selections) or the lasso tool (for more refunded selections) to have a little more control over what gets selected. You will likely grab small parts of the image you want to keep with either of these tools, but in my experience, content aware fill does a nice job of replacing those parts and a little overlap can help make a smoother blend.

3) before you flatten the layers, those white areas should be transparent (shown as small gray & white checkboxes). It's when you flatten the layers that photoshop makes those areas white, which is what's difficult to select with the wand. So instead of flattening the layers, you can merge them. This will maintain the transparent background instead of adding the white (to do this, select all of the image layers in your layers panel, right click and select merge layers). Then, with the magic wand, click in one of the transparent areas. The trick here is that hitting the delete button won't bring up content aware fill option unless the image has been flattened. So instead hit shift+f5 (on a Pc at least, not sure about Macs) to bring up the content aware fill dialog box.

4) or, before you flatten your image, create a new layer and fill it with the worst color you can. I'm thinking hot pink, but any color that is not in your photos will work. Move the "hot pink" layer to the bottom in your layers panel. Now flatten the image. Photoshop won't add the white edges because you already have a layer ( the hot pink one) that fills the space. Then you can use the magic wand to select just the hot pink areas, hit delete and let photoshop fill them in.

Just an FYI, I'm writing this on my iPad and doing the best I can to write this from memory so I may have gotten a keystroke or something similar wrong. If I'm way off and you can't find what I'm talking about, let me know and I'll load up photoshop and double check myself.

Hope that helps!

Thanks for that Chris. I checked the tolerence and it was at 100. When I reduced it down to say 10 it worked fine. I can follow those intructions perfectly and that is a tremendois help.
I really appreciate that Chris.
Cheers
Bob

canon400d

Anthony wrote: »

Bob, whilst the suggestions to crop this particular image are sound - in this instance - I appreciate you are trying to understand the process of selecting and 'content aware' filling blank areas after creating panoramas. Using the magic wand tool is just one way of selecting the area to be filled. I often use the lasso tool to select (in fact slightly over-select seems to work best) an area and then go under the EDIT menu, select FILL and click OK. You might try the various selection methods available in PS to see which works best in a given set of circumstances.

Anthony.

PS. I downloaded the picture you offered and tidied up the edges in four or five separate selections fairly well.

Thanks Anthony I have tried the Lasso tool and yes it works a treat. A brilliant option. I really appreciate that Anthony.
Cheers
Bob

canon400d

pathfinder wrote: »

Bob, you are using the wrong tool to remove the white areas around your image with the Magic Wand. You want to use the Quick Select Tool. which is in the tool palette along with the Magic Wand.

I posted a thread here about swapping backgrounds, in which I described using the Quick Select Tool. I think you will find he Quick Select Tool is a much better choice for selecting the areas you want to delete, over the Magic Wand. After selecting with the Quick Select Tool, go to Refine Edges to really finish your selection so that there in no white or black margin to your selection.

If you select unwanted areas when you click with your Quick Select Tool, make your brush smaller with your right ] bracket key, hold down your option key, as you select the areas you want de-selected, and you can add and subtract from your selection quite quickly. Most of my simple selections take less than 60 seconds today with the Quick Select tool which you activate via the w key, just like the Magic Wand tool also.

I used the Quick Select Tool, while sitting in a workshop this weekend, to select the snake in an image for the drop down shadow. The selection took less than 2 minutes.

Yes Pathfinder I totally agree with you that the quick selection tool is brilliant and I often use it with a small brush and 100% success everytime. In the Pano tutorial they were using the magic wand tool and this was the reason I used it. The option Anthony suggested with the lasso tool is quite good also. But yes I will always use the quick selection tool for the majority of tasks.
Cheers
Bob