The trials of Photoshop CS5 are available for download, and of
course the first thing I did was to try a “Brenizer method” panorama on
them. Since I like to be timely, here’s one I just shot a few hours
ago, during an engagement shoot with Jennifer and Richard.

For new readers, basically the trick is to use a multi-image
panorama to make for a super-shallow depth-of-field by using a longer
lens. This was 18 images with an 85mm f/1.4. If I’d had to use a
shorter lens like a 24mm to capture everything in one frame, all of
that background foliage would be in focus as well. Here is an example
of a single frame from the shot:

I have not been happy overall with the performance of CS4 in
stitching these sorts of panoramas, keeping CS3 around or using a
dedicated program like Autopano Pro. Is CS5 better? On the good side, I
fed it 18 full-resolution images, which usually causes Photoshop to
hang for a long time, if not crash. It took a while, but the progress
was steady and measured, and produced an image without major artifacts.
On the bad side, it still has the CS4 habit of throwing pieces it
doesn’t know what to do with into the corner and not making it easy to
move them:

Now the exciting part is “content aware fill,” which fills in gaps
by taking into account all of the textures around it. And it seems to
work really, really well in general. Here was the cropped section, with
a gap the stitching couldn’t fill. One swipe of content-aware spot
healing produced the image up top:

BUT you have to be careful when doing these panoramas, as the whole
point of them is to create a very three-dimensional look where
everything is in a certain amount of focus due to its relationship to
the focal plane (like most pictures, just more so). Photoshop will very
happily grab the surrounding textures even if they’re in a different
part of the focal plane, which in this case would have made
content-aware fills of the out-of-focus brown patches in the grass look
out-of-place. Overall, though, it should be a valuable tool in the
panorama arsental.