Playing With Pictures

The weather was absolutely beautiful today, with warm weather and clear blue skies. I took some time to walk around and take some photographs. This first picture is the Iwo Jima Memorial in Arlington:



The next picture doesn't look like anything significant in a small format, but represents some fun experimenting with photopgrahic panoramas. I've been playing around tonight with stiching photos together using Photoshop. Photoshop has a useful photo merging utility to create a panorama from several photos. It is great at fixing perspective problems, but it is not very tolerant of exposure differences. However, Photoshop layers can be used to manually merge photos, which is what I did with this one:



Something that I discovered is that water scenes do not lend themselves well to merging, because the water is too dynamic. Supposedly gradients used with layer masks in Photoshop CS can help with this problem. Unfortunately, Photoshop Elements doesn't have this capability, so I'm left with manually blurring seams in the photo.