Some cool panoramas from Lizard Island

I had a little fun with Photoshop, stitching together some photos that I took at Lizard island. I didn’t originally intend to turn these photos into panoramas, but I’m fairly pleased with the results. Once again, Photoshop is witchcraft.

The lizard Island Group lagoon, taken from the lizard neck peninsula of lizard Island. From left to right: Bird Islet, South Island, and Palfrey Island protect the lagoon.

This is the view back at Watsons Bay from the start of the ridge leading up to Cook's Look (visible in the last photo). Watsons Bay is adjacent to the ludicrously expensive resort. It is an Australian National Park area and provides a place to anchor for pleasure yachties.

A higher altitude view of Watsons Bay from the Cook's Look ridge path. South and Palfrey Islands are coming into view in the background.

Watsons Bay and Cook's Look hill, taken from an outcrop near the resort. The Cook's Look trail starts at the beach of Watsons Bay, climbs to the left to mount the ridge, and then continues along the ridge to the summit. The 395 meter hill is so named because Captain James Cook climbed it in order to plot a course out of the maze of reefs in the area in 1770.

Adobe Photoshop CS5: Now with witchcraft!

The new version of the indispensable Photoshop image editor came out a couple days ago, and includes an unbelievable feature called Content Aware Fill. According to Adobe:

We have developed interactive image editing tools using a new randomized algorithm for quickly finding approximate nearest neighbor matches between image patches.

Essentially it removes unwanted items from an image instantly and seamlessly. Alterations that used to take a skilled Photoshop user hours to preform are completed in seconds with almost no competence required. Watch these videos; and if image editing is a time consuming part of your work, prepare to pick your jaw up off the floor.

This one starts off with minor tweaks, like removing lens flare and bits of trash from a scene, but skip to the middle or so to see the ridiculously awesome stuff.

This video shows how great this is for easily toughing up images.

There is a better explanation of how Content Aware Fill works, here. I prefer to think it uses witchcraft or is the rudimentary self-aware beginnings of Skynet. Run for it, Sarah Connor.