Technique / Discuss

jkottke says:

This technique is similar to making panoramas except that you're stitching together several views of the same scene...it's a panorama in time rather than in space.

Here's one I made the other day:



This is a composite of 4 different photos shot with a Nikon D70. I got pretty lucky in capturing the jumper in those positions...I had it set for continuous shooting and held down the shutter release button until he landed. Didn't bother with locking the exposure or anything since it was all the same scene and it only took a second or two. No tripod...just got the shutter as fast as I could for the light levels and held the camera in the same spot while I shot.

In Photoshop (you could use any similar program), I stacked the four images in layers and temporarily adjusted the layer opacities to 40-60% so that I could see all the images overlapping at once and looked for the "simplest" image to use for the background. The crowd and traffic behind the crowd were moving (even during the 1-2 seconds the jump took) so I needed to find an image where the background immediately surrounding each instance of the jumping guy in the final composite was almost identical to the guy's immediate background in each individual photo. As an example, I couldn't use the fourth photo's background as the composite image's background because there was a bright yellow taxi behind the first and second guy's positions which would have been really hard to get rid of. This sounds a bit confusing, but if you play around with this technique, you'll see what I mean in short order.

Once I had a background image for the composite (I used the background from the second guy's photo), I used the lasso tool to select and copy each of the three remaining guys from their respective photos and pasted them on top of the composite background. When copying the guys, you'll want to take a healthy chunk of their immediate background with them...it's useful in lining them up against the composite background (the lines in the sidewalk in this photo were great for this purpose). To line them up, position them in the general area, toggle the guy's layer on and off to compare with the background, and nudge as needed. When it looks as though the guy appears out of nowhere when the layer is flipped on, he's in the right spot. (You can also temporarily adjust the opacity of the guy's layer to 50-60% and nudge until the backgrounds line up, but I find that the layer toggling works better.)

After getting each guy in the right position, you may need to delete a bit of background around each of them to make things look right. For instance, the man in the white cap to the right of guy #4 moved between the taking of the second and fourth photos so when I pasted guy #4 in, there were two instances of the guy with the white cap. To remove the second guy, I carefully deleted him from the background of guy #4 with the eraser...luckily everyone in that area was wearing black so it was pretty easy to do. I then touched up each pasted guy, correcting a bit for brightness/contrast on one of them. Then I flattened the image and used the levels and brightness/contrast to brighten up the final image.

Clear as mud, I'm sure. Let me know if you need clarification on anything. (And bonus points to anyone who can pick out copy/pasting errors in the image...there are a couple small ones that you'd only notice if you're looking for them.)

[tags: manipulation]
Posted at 8:55AM, 16 November 2004 PDT (permalink)