Pass Creek, Waterton, 2005

If you take a pony treck in Waterton, you ford the river just below this point. With a bit of care, you can wade across, water just above the knees and get to the beach. In theory you could climb down to the beach from the same side but I'm not going to guarantee you'd get back up again. Two images stitched with PTMac, output as multiimage TIFF and brought into Photoshop. The left image was added to the right as a separate layer, a white mask created and then with 80 percent sharpness of the brush, I painted black into the white mask to reveal the underneath right image, being careful to blend the images so no seams would show. In theory this should not be needed and you could let PTMac do the blend but unless you rotate the lens exactly around the nodal point, this can create trouble and I confess I have simply been rotating around the lens collar and not using my slider (the clamp points the wrong way for the lens collar).

Once I have the two images blended, I flatten the image, trim excess and work on it as I would any other image.

In this case, I warmed the image a bit with a colour balance layer, used a selective colour layer to redden the yellow ever so slightly, did some curves layers with masking to affect particular parts of the image, used Akvis Enhancer to bring out texture and open the shadows, used smart sharpen then Photokit output sharpener and printed it.

The images were shot on the 1Ds2, my 70-200 f4L lens, the final image size is approx. 7000X6000 pixels (I uprezed one notch in Camera Raw - 25 meg. output instead of 16, before doing the stitching on the tiff files output from Camera Raw).

PTMac loses the colourspace information so it's imprortant to assign the image ProPhoto Colourspace. The change in colour is dramatic and is back to what you saw with Camera Raw.

Note that I didn't get round to doing anything with image till more than a year later - one of the downsides of stitching, until you put the images together you don't know what you have. I do occasionally put the images together with Photohops stitching routine but it isn't accurate or useable and doesn't save that much time over the new automated matching point routines of PTMac.