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Photomerge in Adobe Bridge CS4

Everyone has seen those awesome multi-freeze frame photos of athletes doing their high-speed moves like this one of Dave Watson. Dave pulled off a stunt during the Tour de France, in the Alp d'Huez stage. He waited for the peloton to round the corner in the mountains and proceeded to literally jump over them. The good news is that he wasn’t arrested and thrown into jail. The bad news is that he didn’t land it.

I’ve always thought that the process to make a photo like this was long and arduous, requiring a film camera exposing multiple times on the same frame. But if that were the case, wouldn’t the photo turn out overexposed? The guys at Adobe answer the question. In Adobe Bridge CS4 there is an option called “Photomerge” that makes the process of creating an amazing action photo easy as buying tainted meat from McDonalds.

Dave Watson jumping riders in the Tour De France

Open Bridge and locate a few photos that are fragments of a cohesive whole. I’ll use something practical from a productivity standpoint. In the office we’ll often brainstorm and fill a dry-erase board with boatloads of information that ends up as a coherent sitemap or a straightforward concept for the operation of a function we’re implementing on a site, ect.

The downside to this is that the whiteboard needs erasing, so we take photos of the board, but as larger sections so that the writing isn’t illegible on screen. Before we pieced together the photos in Photoshop, but only with limited success. After all, there are sections where the white balance is different, not to mention the other automatic corrections such as exposure, ISO and aperture. With Bridge’s Photomerge option, all of this is fixed on the fly.

Best of all, once you select the photos you want, it only takes three clicks of the mouse to use it. Here’s how it works.

Open Bridge and locate the files you want to merge. Here’s mine:

Select your images then go to Tools > Photostop > Photomerge

This dialog will open up in Photoshop:

I always select the Auto Layout option.

Click OK and watch the magic. Here is a final version of what Photoshop produced with a little Level correction.

We looked for seems and found nothing. Here is a screen shot of the layers and masks that Photoshop produced:

After seeing the automated attention to detail in the masks, I felt like a weight that has never had to be carried by me is no longer a looming ominous threat. Could you imagine having to do the job that that little trick just did?

Here are a few more images that caught my attention while searching around:

Growing up racing BMX has obviously influenced my genre of taste.

I’d love to hear if any of you have used this tool, if you’ve seen cool pictures you think have been created successfully, and if you haven’t used it, how you will plan to use it now that I’ve bestowed this piece of wisdom that was once imparted to me.

Thanks for the read!

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