This morning I shot some balancing rocks at sunrise and then returned to the bus to start backing up my photos. The next thing I knew, the doorbell rang (yes I have one) and there stands two friends who just happened to see me parked and thought "I wonder if that’s Ben’s bus". I’ve been found! It turns out that a few of the people who make PhotoshopWorld happen have decided to fly out early to explore the Southwest. They were passing by on their way to Monument Valley and I might get a chance to meet up with them when they come back to Page, AZ.
I spent yesterday exploring Yellow Rock, Grosvenor Arch and a few other stops along Cottonwood Canyon Road. Today, I’ll be exploring Toadstool trail and taking a break to get organized for PhotoshopWorld and spend time trying to figure out how to load topo maps onto my handheld GPS.
Great photo. Any guidance on how you created this multi shot treatment?
Dan,
I shot the pano handheld and wasn’t trying to have them each rotated, they just turned out that way. I aligned them using Tools>Photoshop>Photo Merge in Bridge (just make sure you actually rotate each image because photo merge can’t do that automatically). I also used the Keep as Layers feature so that photo merge didn’t attempt to blend the images together.
After the image was open in Photoshop, I clicked on one of the layers and added a white stroke Layer Style (also known as layer effects), a drop shadow and an black outer glow (with it’s blending mode set to multiply instead of the default which is screen)… I had to mess with the Size and Spread settings quite a bit to get the glow to show up beyond the edge of the stroke… but just a little so the edge of the white stroke would separate from the white background.
I then Control-clicked (Mac), or Right-clicked (Win) on the layer and chose Copy Layer Style, held Shift and clicked on the bottom layer to get them all selected, control-clicked again on a layer and chose Paste Layer Style to get the drop shadow/stroke/glow to apply to all the other layers. Then I used the crop tool to add some extra space around the image so none of the drop shadows were being cut off.
Hope that helps.
-Ben
Thanks for the explanation. You did a great job!