Draconaei’s Blog

Here’s the explanation for anyone that was curious about the process… and, I’ll admit, so I can show the level of detail in these images, which can’t be captured at monitor or website size. It was a great deal of fun to work on, but also a much more extensive time commitment than I’d estimated.

I began with a series of photos I took while in Jordan. I remained stationary and rotated the camera across my view from left to right, overlapping each picture slightly with the next. Once home, I used autostitch to combine the separate photos into this original panorama:

I can’t decide if autostitch is cheating, or merely using an available tool. Either way, the program is free online (and even legal!) so I highly recommend it to anyone needing to stitch images together. It’s not perfect, but overall it does a great job.

After making a copy of the image file, I opened the file in Photoshop, and began deleting everything except the ruins. I sometimes used the magic wand tool (which selects everything in the area matching the selected color range.) Unfortunately it tended to miss edges, or select an entire section of stone when the plants were blurry or too similar in color, so I ended up manually tracing out most details with the lasso tool anyway. See the work in progress:

This was, by far, the most painstaking and thorough step. Once completed, the rest was simple. With the ruins isolated, I created two new image files. In the first, I converted the ruins to greyscale and slightly upped the contrast, and then pasted this layer on top of the original panorama. In the second, I converted the entire original panorama to greyscale, upped the contrast, and then pasted the isolated ruins into a higher layer. In both cases, the isolated ruins obscured the unedited ruins below, but being from the same original image, the lines are only distinct by color difference.

There you have it! Some have asked for copies of the image files. If you want them, let me know! All I ask is credit for having created them.

Recently I had the good fortune of traveling to Jordan on scholarship, to study the cultural use of architecture and space. As a part of this study (and for my own artistic desires) I often took a series of photographs in linear sequence to later stitch together and form a panorama. My favorite site for this was Jerash, the ruins of an ancient Roman city.

Time has a strangely disjointed feel, where the ruins feel frozen in the past, and stand in stark contrast to the overgrown plants, and you walking among them. I wanted to emphasize this feeling more strongly than would be conveyed through just a photograph, so I isolated past and present artifacts by use of color and greyscale. (click on each image for a larger version)

The files are quite large, so I plan to frame some large prints soon for my new apartment. Post showing the photoshop process, coming soon!