Status-Q

I’m occasionally snatching the odd moment to get to grips with my new copy of Photoshop CS3, and there are some lovely new features. One of them is the excellent ‘photomerge’ facility for merging and aligning photos, which, amongst other things, makes for very good panoramas.

So today I was playing with the largest photo I’ve created so far. It’s an evening view in North Island, New Zealand, and is a little over 25Mpixels, created from several raw images merged. I didn’t take much care over the originals – I just jumped out of the car and snapped away, hand-held, in pretty low light. Still, it was the set of photos I happened to have at hand, so here it is at about 1/20th of its full resolution:

And here is a slightly larger version which will probably still fit on your monitor.

But how to appreciate the full image? It looks very nice on my 24″ monitor with 1440×900 resolution, but even that only shows me a fraction of the full resolution. I think I need to find somewhere that will create large prints in unusual aspect ratios.

If you want to get more of a feeling for the original resolution, you can try a page including a Flash-based viewer generated directly from Photoshop’s ‘Zoomify’ feature. You can zoom in and out and drag the image around. This won’t show you the full original quality but you can get close. You can just see the sheep on the hills beyond the road, for example. But it’s pretty hard to see the borders where Photoshop merged the original 5 pictures together.

Fun stuff. Here is a full-res JPEG (3M) if you want to test out your JPEG viewer.