I wanted to create a 3-view image of the one watch, a 1950's Hamilton Grade 921 pocket watch, in order to show the dial, movement, and caseback all in the one picture. To this end I took 3 individual images of the watch, (as shown below), ensuring that the posing for each image would fit together to give the combined result I had in mind. The camera viewpoint was not changed, and the watch was positioned in roughly the same area to make sure the 3 images would be compatible in perspective and size. The lighting was also kept as constant as possible to minimise the amount of work needed later to match colour/brightness levels. A background paper was chosen with a texture that was random enough to allow me to do some fiddling with it later to fill out the larger area that the final image would cover.
Below is the result. The 3 individual images were layered together and positioned as I desired. The middle movement image was selected and I then erased the portions of the other images that were not required, leaving the movement image in full. The 3 layers were merged once I was happy with them and the overlapping edges of the 3 images were cleaned up under magnification using the clone tool. As the final image was larger than any of the individual pics I needed to clone and blend the background to fill the area. Finally I burned in the edges of the background and the image was complete.
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Copyright 2005 Paul Delury
