Known Participant

P: Auto Align Layers slightly misalinged

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
December 29, 2019
14 replies
7186 views

I have posted about this previously, but perhaps someone has new sugestions.

I am shooting mutiple exposures of the same fixed image. The images have been taken on a Canon 5D Mk IV on a sturdy tripod with a remote shutter release at the same aperture. I use BBF to reduce any in camera movement.

Because I want to blend those images, I need to ensure the frames or layers are all 100% aligned.

As I shoot and edit a lot of images, I like to speed up my worklow as much as possible by creating preset 'actions', and Auto Align Layers is one of my 'actions'.

Before I apply this preset, and when I zoom in on the 3 layers, all 3 appear aligned. However, when applying >Auto-Align Layers>Auto this misalignes the layers (see attached images).

'Nudging' as as been suggested before is time consuming.

All suggestionss for a solution welcome.

Mac OS Ventura 13.1 PS v.24.1.0 attached images at 400%

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Chuck Uebele

Community Expert

I agree that this is an issue. With all the precautions that you're taking, do you need to auto align. I stopped doing that, as often I didn't need to, and the few that were somehow out of alignment could be nudged.

Chuck Uebele

Community Expert

Moved to Bugs.

D Fosse

Community Expert

Yes, you're right, and it's a bit annoying. It's often a couple of pixels off, and I've made it a habit to always hit ctrl+1 to check and nudge when needed.

Note that the algorithm itself works perfectly. The alignment itself is usually very close to perfect, even subsampling (less than a pixel) when necessary - it's just that it often puts the final resulting layer a few pixels off. Once nudged with the arrow keys, it's dead on.

I've been meaning to post a bug report but never got to it.

EDIT - I'm not moderator, but maybe someone who is could move this to "Bugs"?

X

xibo

Known Participant

I work with real state photography and have had some problems with auto-align in photoshop. Photoshop auto-align simply doesn't work as it should and does not align photos correctly.
Someone else has had identical problems?

If so, how did you solve it?

D Fosse

Community Expert

In my experience the Auto-Align algorithm is very reliable and almost never fails. However, it can sometimes happen that the top layer is offset by a couple of pixels. In that case going to 100% and nudging with the arrow keys will almost always bring them into perfect alignment.

Another thing: The fact that you are using auto-align in this way suggests that you are not using a tripod. With a solid tripod, auto-align should not be necessary at all, at most a single-pixel nudge should be enough.

But without a tripod, parallax error is almost a certainty, especially in a room interior where you have parts of the image at varying distances. Parallax error happens when the optical center of the lens shifts between exposures, and it takes very little for this to become a factor. This will inevitably throw the algorithm off.

AdamB82

Participating Frequently

I use a tripod like every real state professional phtographer should do.
I'm a professional photographer, don't come teach me basic stuff.

Also, instead of telling people they are taking photos wrong. Maybe make your PHOTOSHOP product more powerful and capable? It is very strange that Adobe doesn't just improve autoalign. I don't want to use a tripod. Photoshop should be able to pull this off and other companies HAVE pulled this off. Please fix photoshop.

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