Watkins Glen Canyon

Well first off it's my birthday! I'm 28 years old now. Holy Crap!  

I recently visited the Watkins Glen canyon while on my stay out East.  I always thought Watkins Glen as the place for crazy endurance car racing from my days playing car racing video games.  What I did not know is that Watkins Glen State Park in New York State was a big tourist attraction too.  The canyon is a 400 ft drop and has some amazing waterfalls. In this picture you can see the scale of the canyon with the people climbing up the stairs! Over the past couple days I will post some of my keepers from the trip!

©Matt Graham 2010 - Watkins Glen Canyon

Adobe Photoshop CS5 magic - Content Aware Fill

I was lucky enough to be a Beta tester for Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended since February.  I am so amazed at how cool some of the new features are.  One of them is Content Aware Fill.  I found it great for filling up empty space created by the Panorama merge. 

Here are the two pictures I took of Maligne Canyon and the deadly icy water hole.  In fact, when I was here with Darwin Wiggett, two teenagers who were drunk out of their minds decided to test their fate and climb past the hole with out crampons.  The boys were eventually rescued with a rope that our other guide, Alan Ernst had.  Funny thing was that when we were coming back to the parking lot, the boys were going back to try conquering the canyon again!!

Anyway, here is what Photoshop CS5 came up with.  As you can see there is white space that the merge algorithm created to take into account the change in perspective as I tilted the lens.

After playing with Content Aware Fill, the white space was magically filled! This feature will be fun to try out when I do more panoramas.  Later this week I will show how the new HDR Pro module works.