Splicing together two kodachromes from 1966 (thank you Photoshop!)

Photoshop CS5 is so awesome.  I am almost entirely a Lightroom man, but I do go into Photoshop for three things: (1) panorama stitching, (2) the content-aware tool, and (3) cloning.  The first two features are not available in Lightroom and the third feature, cloning, is far superior in Photoshop in my opinion.

So, here is today's story:

Last weekend I was "digitizing" some of my dad's Kodachrome's from a trip to Europe we took together in 1966.  He used a Kodak Retina IIIC rangefinder camera.  With just a 50mm F2.8 lens, and film rated with an ASA of 25,  many today would view his camera as "limited" in the images it could create.  On the other hand, neither of us knew anything different, so it was quite adequate.

Visiting the Cathedral at Chartres, France we actually thought it was pretty cool that the structure was so large and tall that he couldn't get it all into the viewfinder.  I remember enjoying the slide show we created that first showed the bottom half and then showed the top half. 

When I saw last weekend that the two slides had significant overlap, I was hopeful that I might be able to splice them together into one vertical image. I didn't let myself get too hopeful about the outcome, however, once I noticed that the bottom picture was in horizontal orientation and the top picture was in vertical orientation. 

So... without doing any editing to the images, I decided to challenge photoshop.  I exported the images from Lightroom to Photoshop.  Photoshop did all the rest, automatically.  Below are the two original images and the result from Photoshop.





Next, to create a finished product, and since I couldn't crop the bottom half to fit the top half, I used the "content-aware" tool to fill in the sky in the top half.  It just took a minute or two.  I am happy about the photoshop "content-aware" tool, because I know nothing about layers and all that other good stuff that most power-users of photoshop know.

At this point I still had some fill in some additional sky.

Lastly, after saving the file as a .tiff and bringing it back into Lightroom, I made some other adjustments, such as a slight rotation of the image and some color adjustments.  I am sure more can be done, but the final image below is good enough for me (and my Dad likes it too!)