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Hi! I am Kevin Ames and I am here at PhotoShop World in Las Vegas, Nevada. I want to show you some brand new things about Photoshop CS4 that you have never been able to do before. Take a look at this image of a necklace made by artist, Michael Good, it is about this tall as you can see from the minicolor checker chart on the left hand side.
The problem is it is also about this thick and that means I have got a real depth to field problem. Let me zoom in and show you what I mean. The back edge here is sharp, the front edge is not and Photoshop now has a way of fixing that if you will shoot for it. I am going to close camera raw and open this three images along with the shot of the background and to do that I am going to choose, I am going to right click and choose open in camera raw.
This version of camera raw is hosted by Bridge so we are not in Photoshop yet. Bridge CS4 is an integral component of Photoshop CS4. Let me show you each of these images up close and personal.
I have zoomed all three of them into a hundred percent. On this image, the front edge is sharp and the back edge is not. By option clicking Alt on Windows, I can move to the next image and as soon as it renders, the focus will change this are really big files, they are 16 megapixels.
You will notice now that the front edge is softer and the back edge is getting sharper. We will go to the last image and now the back edge is completely sharp and the front edge is completely out of focus. It would be lovely to be able to combine these in Photoshop easily and in the past you would have to go to a third party piece of software to do this. So, what I want to do now is just load these files into a file in Photoshop.
So, I am going to cancel out of camera raw. I have got all four selected and from the tools menu, I am going to choice Photoshop load files into Photoshop layers. Photoshop opens and automatically builds the files out based on the workflow option set in camera raw and stacks them into a single file. If you look at the layers palette over here, you will notice that the individual files are coming up and they are labeled with the name of the original raw file.
Okay, we have got all four images loaded into a single Photoshop document. I am going to drag, what I will ultimately use as the background layer onto the bottom and now I am interested in blending these so that the focus becomes sharp throughout the depth of this necklace.
So, I will click on one on the first image hold down the shift key and click on the last one to select them. Then from the edit menu, I am going to go to auto blend layers and Photoshop is going to stack the images when this button is checked and it will take, as you could see from the icon, it will take out of focus images, areas, and merge them with the sharp areas in other images in the stack into one separate image.
Be sure to click seamless tones and colors. Click okay and Photoshop does the rest. With the blending done, notice that the layer masks are very complex. What Photoshop has done is it has gone through and picked just the sharp areas and masked out all the soft areas.
So, what I want to do is merge these to one layer so you can get an idea of how this works. So, from the layers palette fly out menu I am going to choose merge visible and add the option key for the Mac or the Alt key in Windows. That copies all of these layers to its own layer. And I am going to turn these others off and I am going to hold down the shift key to disable this layer mask.
So, now you can see just this image compared to the sharpness of this one. So, let me zoom in to actual pixels and by the way, Photoshop has changed this command from command option or Ctrl Alt to a plus zero to command one.
Here is the after and there is before. This edge here is sharp, the back edges as soon as I click on the combined layer of these three blended images you will notice that it snaps into focus. So, now you have got a way of creating practically unlimited depth of field by shooting multiple images with different focal points and put them together using auto blend layers in Photoshop CS4 edit menu.
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