My new favorite Photoshop gadget is called the healing tool. It's wonderful! Its icon is a little band-aid!

If you're familiar with the stamp tool in Photoshop (and who isn't, eh?), it works kind of like that, but instead of just copying part of an image from one place to another and stamping it over the top, it copies the part of the image and then *blends* it into the new location. This makes fixing panorama images so much easier and it increases my happiness quotient greatly!

I spent almost this whole weekend working on the panoramas for Bernie. Part of the problem with them is that I had such little time on site that there was no opportunity to shoot each multiple times, which is what's needed to avoid the lens bloom from destroying the image. Instead, I shaded the lens with my hand, which means no bloom, but forces me to edit out my hand and make other adjustments to the image in some cases.

In the end, I have all his images done now, and have devised a clever way to edit out my hand. Instead of trying to simply replace my hand with plain blue sky, a process that can prove very difficult to get right because of having to match gradual shading and colors exactly, I have simply replaced it with clouds taken from one of the other panoramas.

This use of clouds proves to be *much* faster and makes for something interesting in the sky. Clouds did move in during the day, so they're not out of place for the most part. I'm keen to see whether anyone actually notices that the same cloud formation appears in various individual panoramas and does not appear to be moving through the day :-) Sometimes my standard cloud is blended with other clouds using the healing tool, so they don't always look the same.


The "up" view in a panorama, with hand shadowing the lens.



Clouds copied in from a different panorama, where the lens did not have to be shadowed



And speaking of healing and band-aids, my knee needs both. On the way in to campus for our Saturday ride, I turned too sharply on wet pavement and ended up with a large spot of road rash and a missing chunk o' skin on the left lower knee and calf. It stings a bit.