Saturday, May 19, 2007

Photomerge

This isn't a business intelligence post, but one of the reasons I picked the blog name "BI Polar" [1] was because I tend to jump around a lot from topic to topic. Anyway...


...I just discovered a feature in Adobe Photoshop called "Photomerge." It's located on the File Automate submenu and basically "stitches" together a series of photographs to make a larger single panoramic image. Take a look at this example:





(click on the thumbnail for a larger version)





Around a month ago we got a very unseasonable Spring blizzard. We got over 2 feet worth of wet, heavy snow in around 10 hours, and it brought down one of my neighbor's treees onto the fober optic cable through which we get both dial tone and internet. So I was out there in the think of it shoveling the driveway so the repair crews could get to the mess. Before I got started I took a series of six photos, not really making any effort to make them line up with each other.

But Photoshop took them all and with no user input (other than selecting the input files) created the single panoramic image you see above.

Ok, so I may be easily impressed (all of you graphic artists and designers can rest easy, knowing your jobs are secure) but this is a damned impressive feature in my book. I stumbled across it looking for something else, and am glad I did. I wonder if I should buy a Photoshop book or something...

[1] Other blog names considered but ultimately rejected included:
  • BI and Proud
  • BI Curious
  • The Big BI Guy (sort of a homage to "SoCalDevGal")

But for some reason people seemed to think that these would give the wrong impression or something. ;-)

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