4-shot, 1-shot alignment

[Chris Gahran]

I do a lot of primary 4-shot images with 1-shot images taken for painting in during post. I always need to register the 1-shot layers to the master 4-shot layer. I was wondering if anyone knows why? The 1-shots always need to go to the right and up.

It's as if the CCD sits in the bottom left corner of the square movement pattern described by Hasselblad and the 4-shot position is output at physical center of the four moves made by the piezo driven CCD sled.

Just wondering because today I finished post on 76 images that each had from 2-4 single shot images blended in each final image. Whatta pain but it works great.

Chris

[NickT]

Yes it has always been that way, I'll add it to the wish list as you get pretty sick of tapping those arrow keys, you could always write a PS action.

[Chris Gahran]

Thanks Nick,

I was moving as fast as I could through the post on those images so I did not count arrow key taps to accomplish alignment. I like the idea of a PS Action (thanks) so I'll go back and count the tap-taps.

I did have two or three images that when aligned at the bottom were slightly off at the top. That implied to me there was a small size difference between 1-shot and 4-shot. These are hard edged products that are four feet tall (1.2 meters) and it was odd to see the bottom aligned and the top a little off. (I just duped the layer used one for the bottom and the other for the top.)

I'm in, I'm out in fifteen to twenty minutes: trust me a 4-shot with six 1-shots layers, choosing which 1-shots to use, aligning the 1-shots, color balancing some layers, tone balancing other layers, painting masks, blending modes and outputting a layered PSD is not bad at 15-20 minutes each.

Chris

[NickT]

Actually I haven't tried Photoshops auto align, might be worth a look?

[Chris Gahran]

Hi Nick,

I've tried PS auto align. It worked for some but not all layers. I had to check each layer visually so I returned to hand aligning the layers.

I output many images as Layered PSDs from Phocus and Phocus does not align all the layers either. I should say I am not running the latest versions of either PS or Phocus so it's quite possible my misalignment problem is self-inflicted.

Chris