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Let me first say that the curves workshops that have recently been posted are invaluable. The levels ones as well. Thankyou all.

I recently came acoss a scene of which in which I was forced to handhold a very dynamic picture. There was some texture in a very dark area that I needed, some very very bright objects I had to get sharp, and some unbelievable colors in between. I took about twenty shots and saved the three that seem to have the three aspects the best. Now I need to cut and paste the scene together so that I can have all of it as one glorious masterpiece. This may go beyond my abilities just slightly, but I was wondering if anyone can stear me to some advice, or outright give me advice. I'm on PS CS. When it's done I promise to post the pic, I think I might frame and blow up this badboy as it has the potential to make millions of grown men weep for joy.[/b]

Any chance you could post the pics so we can have a look at what you're trying to do? It's hard to imagine what effect you are after!

Cheers,

Jon

Dooda - post the pic up as it is now so that we can give some idea on how to do it.

For starters you could use multiple layers and erase the parts on each layer to build up the final plus there are other ways to do it.

I will understand if you don’y want to post until you have the ”magnificence” completed

A good book on Photoshop CS would be from Peachpit Press - a US company and a lot cheaper than other books.

Chris

Pixspot is telling me that the extension is forbidden, can anyone tell me why? I'll try Flickr.

Edit: Looks like Flickr is taking a while as well. I was thinking about not posting the picture and then showing it in all of it's magnificent gloriosity, but I guess I'll post the picture's composition that I'm going to use. It'll be on my flickr account in about an hour or so. Thanks all.

If the bits you want to merge together are in a straight line (eg a horizon or something) then the easiest way is to paste them all into one workspace add a layer mask to layers you are merging and then click the white layer mask in the layer pallette and then use the gradient tool to do a gradient, this then erases part of the image and gives you a nice gradual entry into the layer... have a play with this anyway (Handy for doing panoramas too)

Okay after going back to the original saved copy, I resized again and this time it worked. Here is the link: Thanks for all of the help Kristine.

(EDIT) Oops. Just checked the link and it went to someone else's picture. I wonder how that happened? Fixed the link and here it is.

http://www.pixspot.com/displayimage.php ... 0013&pos=0

Bumping this thread (hope that that's all right). Feel free to discipline me, but I don't think that Chris or Johnny saw the link.

OK - Thanks Dooda, I see what you're getting at now! The way I had a go at this, (given that i'm not too hot at PS, anyone feel free to correct me ), is to take the original image and copy it into 3 different layers. I called them sky, moon and ground. Then I used a combination of the lasso and the magic wand to select the object I wanted in each layer, for example just the moon. Then by selecting the inverse of the object you have selected (Selection --> Inverse), you can clear the rest of the layer (Edit --> Clear), leaving that object by itself. If you repeat this for the other layers, you should end up with the objects isolated on their own layers. You can then tweak the objects individually, or copy in the contents of a particular layer from another shot. As for smoothly blending the layers back together again, i'm not sure of the best way to do that, hopefully someone else will be able to help with that to bring it back together to a seamless image! Sounds like owens tip might be wht you need for that, but haven't tried it myself.

Hope this helps, (and makes some kind of sense... )

Jon

Ah - if you're stuck, PM me and i'll send you the photoshop file I have with the layers cut, so you can see what I mean.

the gradient tool is a tool of the devil. Who said to use this thing? It should be cast into the firy pools of mount doom. I never know what it's going to do. Paint the photo red? Paint it white, cut a huge diagonal line down the corner and paint the lower half white?

I curse on this gradient tool! (insert some kind of terrible curse). Thanks for listening.

I need to fork out some money and take a course on PS. This is ridiculous. If my life were a slab of cheese, photoshop just took a cleaver and lopped off the last quarter of it.