Digital Light & Color

I often take hand held bracketed landscapes, with a view that I will use Composite to utilize an over exposed sky.

Where there is straightforward skyline, the Alignment Points do not need accurately placing. However, when there is an object such as a tree branch overlapping the sky, I need to have the APs accurately placed.

In PWP 6.0, I would have the Input and Overlay windows open together. I would then place an AP on the Input, then on the Overlay. I would progressively increase the level of zoom on each window, with the accuracy of the APs increasing each time until I reached pixel level. Using the keyboard to locate the APs this was a quick and accurate method of aligning the images.

I would appreciate advice on achieving the same degree of accuracy in PWP 8.0. I have not found how to have the Input and Overlay windows open together, and when I toggle between the windows, I would like to maintain the same level of zoom in both.

This is unfortunately an area where PWP 8 is inferior to previous versions. Personally, I always use a tripod in this situation so I never encounter the problem, but I understand why you would find it useful.

My plan for the future is to implement an auto-alignment transformation that could be used to register one or more images to a reference image.

In the meantime...

Looking at the code, I noticed that I never got around to implementing the use of the keyboard to type an alignment point number to center the display on that alignment point, so I will be fixing that for the next release. There may be something I can do about the zoom factor as well.

A suggestion you may find helpful is to first do an approximate manual alignment using 2 point shift/rotate and then set Operation to Absolute Difference. Then use the arrow buttons to nudge the alignments points and the rotation angle until the difference image goes more or less black. Finally, switch the Operation back to Register and click OK.

Another tip for zooming an image while keeping an alignment point centered is to place the cursor on or near the alignment point and the rotated the mouse scroll wheel.

Many thanks for your comprehensive reply.

With regard to the 2 Point Alignment and Absolute Difference - I have aligned and blended 2 bracketed images (+1 and -1) using the arrow keys. This was far quicker than in PWP 6, and even without a Mask a good image was produced. This will now be my preferred method of blending 2 bracketed images to compensate for an over exposed sky.

An Auto-alignment feature would certainly complement the Stack transformation.

One additional point about the arrow keys in case you did not see it in the help file is that you can use them to make finer adjustments if you hold down the Shift key.

Also, I recommend removing barrel/pincushion distortion in your raw converter before compositing as this will yield a more accurate result.