How to Align Similar Photographs in Adobe Photoshop

[KodyWallice]

There’s an old trick that works very well when trying to remove people from public places in your photography. Let’s say you have your tripod set up and you’re facing your camera at the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Or even the Colosseum in Rome. It could be anywhere that’s popular and that people often congregate. And your camera doesn’t even need to be attached to a tripod. It can be hand-held. The point is, it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to capture a photograph of an empty venue that’s always got the public milling about. So what can you do? Well, the old trick I’m referring to is to take multiple photos of the same area while the people are walking around. Then, bring those photos back home and open them up in Adobe Photoshop. There’s a way to align the images in Photoshop so they’re virtually indistinguishable from one another in all areas, except for the people in the photos. Then, you can use masks to mask out each and every body. When I first discovered this trick on Youtube some years ago, I put my palm to my forehead and wondered why I hadn’t thought of something like that.

In today’s post, I’d like to walk through a very simplified version of the example I just discussed above. In my example though, I’m going to use two photos of a red squirrel that were kindly offered to me by Glaszart.com. My task is to align these two images in Adobe Photoshop. That’s as far as I’ll go. If this were a real project, I’d most likely be aligning two photos that had the squirrel doing two different things, such as looking in distinct directions. If I liked the body in one photo and the head in the other, I could easily align both photos and then mask out either the body or head in one or the other. That’s primarily what this workflow is all about.

The Working Photo​

This is one of the squirrel images. The other is pretty much identical to this one, so I’ll just post one.



It’s a very nice photo, isn’t it? If you want to check out more great photography, I highly suggest you take a look at Glaszart.

Opening the Photos as Layers in Photoshop​

The first thing I’ve got to do is move the images into Photoshop as separate layers, in the same file. The easiest way to do this is to access the images in Adobe Bridge and then follow a command that will make that happen.

First, I’ll select both images in Bridge.



Then, I’ll head up to the Tools > Photoshop > Load Files into Photoshop Layers menu item in Bridge and click.



Doing this will result in both photos being opened in Photoshop in the same file as different layers, just as I wanted.

Aligning the Layers​

Layer alignment is a simple process. Before I go through it though, I’d like to show you how the current layers aren’t aligned. To do this, I’ll reduce the opacity of the top layer to 50% and then I’ll take a screenshot to show you just how misaligned they are. Take a look.



Man, that image makes me dizzy.

Anyway, to align the layers (or most everything in the layers), I’ll first make sure both layers are selected in the Layers panel and then I’ll head up to the Edit > Auto-Align Layers menu item and click.



When I do that, the Auto-Align Layers dialog box will appear. I’ll keep everything set to their default settings and click OK. From experience, the Auto option does a perfect job 99.9% of the time, so that’s what I recommend keeping things set to.



And that should do it. It’s that easy. If I look at the edges of each layer, I can tell that they were somewhat shifted. Photoshop bends, twists and warps images so they’re aligned with one another. This is a very powerful command. You don’t even need to have the same zoom values in your photos for them to be aligned. Check out the edges in this next screenshot.

Masking Part of a Layer​

Okay, fine. You twisted my arm. I’ll go ahead and quickly mask part of the top layer, just to show you why this process is so handy to know.

Let’s say that the top layer’s squirrel face had a blemish on it, but the bottom layer’s face was perfect. The reason I aligned the layers was to keep most of the top layer’s image, but to remove the face and use the bottom layer’s face. To deal with this, I’ll select the top layer in the Layers panel and then I’ll go down to the bottom of the panel and click the Add Layer Mask button. This will add a mask to the right of the top layer thumbnail.

Once that’s done, I’ll head over to the Brush Tool, select it, size it and change the color to black. Finally, making sure the layer mask thumbnail is selected in the Layers panel, I’ll paint away the squirrel’s head. The bottom one will show through and my project will be complete.



I hope I clearly explained how to use Adobe Bridge to load files as layers in Photoshop and then how to align similar images in Photoshop for multiple uses. If you have any questions, please let me know in the comment section below or ask away on the Photoshop discussion board. Thanks for reading!

 

[KodyWallice]

The Auto-Align Layers Feature in Photoshop​

Did you know that Adobe Photoshop offers an incredibly accurate and extremely handy feature in it that aligns similar images? It does and it’s marvelous. For a comprehensive article written about this alignment feature, click on through. First though, please allow me to explain what alignment is all about.

Generally, when photographers are out in the field taking photos, they snap, snap and then snap some more. What I mean here is that most photographers take many more than just one photo of the same thing, almost guaranteeing they get “the shot.” I’m sure you’ve heard the click, click, click of a photographer’s camera as he or she is shooting. Now, if you look at those resulting images, you’ll probably find that they all look identical. They’re not. They may look it, but there’s variations in each one.

Let’s say a photographer is taking photos of a bird at a bird feeder. For the first shot, the bird is looking at the camera. That’s good. But the legs aren’t in a good position. For the second shot, the legs are in the perfect position, but the head is turned the wrong way. And for the third shot, the body is great, but the legs and the head are all wrong. In all three shots though, the bird looks like it’s standing in an almost identical pose. This is the ultimate situation to take advantage of the auto-align feature in Photoshop.

To take advantage of the alignment feature, you’ll first need to open your similar images as layers in Photoshop. After that, click to select each layer so they’re all selected simultaneously. Then, head up to the Edit > Auto-Align Layers menu item and select it. From there, a dialog box will appear that gives you a few different options for different types of alignments. Choose the Auto option and then click the OK button. After a few seconds, you’ll notice that Photoshop has aligned the similar parts of each photo, so each of those parts perfectly lies on top of one another in their own layers.

So what’s the use? Well, since there are good and bad parts of each photo, you can simply mask away the bad parts and leave the good parts. So if all you want is the bird’s head that’s facing you in the first photo, then go ahead and mask away everything in that photo, but the head. Then, for the second photo, you can mask everything away, but the feet and for the third image, you can leave it as is, because the good head and the good feet will be covering the lousy head and lousy feet in that image, but the body and everything else is okay. So really, it’s all about aligning multiple images to take advantage of the good parts and masking away the bad parts. A combining, if you will.

For a more thorough discussion on this topic, you can read all about the auto-align tool here. If you have any questions regarding this feature of Photoshop, please ask below and if you have anything to add, please add that below as well. Thanks!

 

[Dave]

I like your post a lot, but I don't understand how you are doing it. I'm running Photoshop CC 2020 but I can't get this option to work. Was needed to do my job? What would you say how can I do it?

 

[KodyWallice]

I like your post a lot, but I don't understand how you are doing it. I'm running Photoshop CC 2020 but I can't get this option to work. Was needed to do my job? What would you say how can I do it?

View attachment 9252

Are the layers that you'd like to align selected in the Layers panel? They should be for this feature to work.