How to combine two "nearly good" photos
December 13, 2016 5:02 AM Subscribe
In nearly-2017 is there an amazing tool that will let me take two "nearly good" photos, and combined them into one great photo?
I often end up with two photos - but the first photo has someone with their eyes closed, and the second photo has someone looking away from the camera.
Is the best way to deal with this layers and manual work, or is there a better way nowadays, where I mark which part of the photo is bad and it merges it with the other photo? Kind of like content-aware fill plus ai on caffeine?
I often end up with two photos - but the first photo has someone with their eyes closed, and the second photo has someone looking away from the camera.
Is the best way to deal with this layers and manual work, or is there a better way nowadays, where I mark which part of the photo is bad and it merges it with the other photo? Kind of like content-aware fill plus ai on caffeine?
I know that Canon developed a technology (in their cameras) called "blink shot" that would only shoot when all eyes are open. That was a while ago.
Photoshop is obviously designed for this kind of thing, and has tools to facilitate making a composite best shot.
posted by adamrice at 7:34 AM on December 13, 2016
Photoshop is obviously designed for this kind of thing, and has tools to facilitate making a composite best shot.
posted by adamrice at 7:34 AM on December 13, 2016
Depending on how picky you are about glitches like partial double images and mis-aligned overlays that can occur in auto-magical composite image layering, manually modifying photos isn't all that bad if you have close matches in terms of photo angle and people's positions. To make this or other methods work well, take a ton of photos in burst mode or any way you can snap 4 or more photos in quick succession, to minimize the movement of the photographer and the people in the photos.
If you want to try out software without plunking down a good chunk of change for Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, you can try GIMP, a free image manipulation program. In the detailed documentation of GIMP, there's a chapter on combining images, and here's a shorter, graphic tutorial on blending exposures that covers much of the photo editing basics behind mixing photos. And you can find plenty of video tutorials on YouTube and elsewhere (random example: Gimp tutorial - How to combine / blend two pictures together).
And because there are a lot more tutorials for Photoshop than GIMP, you can make GIMP work like Photoshop to ease that transition.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:43 AM on December 13, 2016 [1 favorite]
If you want to try out software without plunking down a good chunk of change for Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, you can try GIMP, a free image manipulation program. In the detailed documentation of GIMP, there's a chapter on combining images, and here's a shorter, graphic tutorial on blending exposures that covers much of the photo editing basics behind mixing photos. And you can find plenty of video tutorials on YouTube and elsewhere (random example: Gimp tutorial - How to combine / blend two pictures together).
And because there are a lot more tutorials for Photoshop than GIMP, you can make GIMP work like Photoshop to ease that transition.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:43 AM on December 13, 2016 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: So it seems like Google Photos comes the closest, but doesn't meet my needs because I'd like an offline tool.
Unfortunately manually doing things with layers is something I had hoped wasn't necessary any more - but many thanks for the advice. I will revisit this again in a couple of years.
posted by bergnotburg at 3:40 AM on December 14, 2016
Unfortunately manually doing things with layers is something I had hoped wasn't necessary any more - but many thanks for the advice. I will revisit this again in a couple of years.
posted by bergnotburg at 3:40 AM on December 14, 2016
Best answer: I recall Microsoft advertising this feature a few years ago. It looks like it is a feature in Windows Photo Gallery called "Photo Fuse".
posted by misterbrandt at 6:18 AM on December 14, 2016
posted by misterbrandt at 6:18 AM on December 14, 2016
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by beyond_pink at 5:35 AM on December 13, 2016 [1 favorite]