I posted this sand sculpture yesterday with it’s creator. I found out today that “Poo” is crab in Thai, so wasn’t the sculptor’s name after all – doh !
I took two photos planning to join them at home. None of my software would join the two photos 😦 … Reason, not enough overlap, there was 0% overlap just under the first “O”.
Quick How-to: In Photoshop CS6, I created a large enough canvass to accommodate both photos and space to stretch them. I used the Edit-Transform tools, skew, warp, distort etc in conjunction with rotating the image on the right. Basically they need to be sized and oriented as to line up, quite fiddly. Then use the eraser on the right image, make the join less noticeable. Sharpen filter on the left, Gaussian blur on the right. Then select the right image, feather edge 10px, inverse then delete (gives a smoother join). Then I fiddled with the Levels, the right image I used the mid-tone pipette to make the sand a bit gray-er. Need to get the look of both images as similar as possible. Merge/Flatten the layers. Crop. A little bit of Clone tool to tidy the join a touch. Job done.
Definitely not perfect, but very good first attempt, that I’m pleased with. Perhaps now I’ll be able to stitch other Panorama’s manually that I can’t do with software, provided time and patience !
Contact Sheet :
Photos (c) Don Charisma, taken Thailand 2013
Don Charisma 
Great job at the merge. You’ve done really well considering you didn’t have an overlap to make thinks easier. 🙂
There’s also the angles to consider, for merging photos best with tripod … it almost didn’t merge, and I almost gave up several times, but my pano knowledge, your advice and a little bit of reading up on google all fed into it 🙂 Not “perfect” but next time I will shoot better and it’ll be quicker and easier to join.
I have recently tried a fe whitings in photoshop – and well, it makes me appreciate this post – because photoshop is tricky. And wow – without overlap that is a seamless fit (at least from what i could see) – – and who knew “poo” meant crab!! lol.
The size reduction helps to cover any “flaws” left, although it’s very close. Every time I use Photoshop I seem to learn something new, it’s an incredibly diverse piece of software. Usually I look around on google for info when I want to do something, or ask a couple of friends on wordpress, then just go off and keep on pressing buttons until something works 🙂 warm regards DC
Thanks for sharing.
Irene
You’re welcome 😉