AV News 178 - November 2009
Select from the dropdown menu Files, then click the Browse button to
navigate to the directory where your files are stored, select the files to be
registered. Your selected files will appear in the central large white box, in the
example used these are all native Photoshop .psd files but yours may well be
.jpg files. You may also select an open file simply by clicking the Add Open
File button. At the bottom left corner of this control panel sit two small tick
boxes, ensure that the box marked Attempt to Automatically Align Source
Images is ticked. When satisfied that everything is correctly selected click the
OK button.
You will now have a new open file in your workspace containing several
layers; each layer will be one of the files you chose to stack. Photoshop
should already have attempted to align these layers at the opening stage, it
usually makes quite a reasonable job of doing so, but this largely depends on
image content. To fine tune this alignment select the most appropriate layer
to lock in position. Lock the layer by clicking the Lock Position icon which
looks like crossed double arrows, this is located just left of the icon which
looks like a little padlock on the layers palette, ensure that all other layers are
NOT locked. All layers to be aligned must now be selected i.e. highlighted in
blue, the easiest way to achieve this is to left click the top layer, then hold
down the Shift key and left click the bottom layer. All layers from top to bottom
will now be selected.
From the main menu bar at the top of
Photoshop click on Edit, then on Auto-Align
Layers. Another control box containing four
radio button options should appear. From top
to bottom these options are named: Auto,
Perspective, Cylindrical and Reposition Only.
For our purposes the Auto button usually
works best and should be tried first, if the result
of this action is not satisfactory then try the
Reposition Only button.
At this point it's good housekeeping to save
this file as a native Photoshop .psd format as
this will enable you to come back to this file
later should you need to edit further. Now that
your layers are (or should be) in register use
the crop tool to crop your image to whatever
size you require i.e. 1024 x 768 pixels or 1400
x 1050 pixels etc. It's useful to store these sizes
as crop pre-sets because you will probably use them regularly. All layers will
now be registered and cropped to exactly the same size.
Sequentially copy and paste each layer into a new file and save as .jpg
format using an appropriate name applicable to your sequence. Insert these
files into PicturesToExe or whatever other programme you use. Although this
may seem complicated it's actually very simple, the whole process with five
or six images should take less than five minutes from start to finish.
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