A Tutorial Using an Excel Spreadsheet and Adobe Photoshop to Coregister/Overlay Images
Getting Started

Note: This tutorial was written for Photoshop 5.0; the tutorial for Photoshop 6.0 will be ready soon.

Note that the RED text denotes steps in the process. BLACK text explains and clarifies the process.

1) Open the Excel file. (Click on MapOverlay.xls.zip to download.)
2) After opening the file, enable macros.
3) Clear input value(s).
4) Launch Adobe Photoshop. Make sure all appropriate tools are open. You will see the Tool Bar on the left side of the screen.

Under the Window Menu you need to choose Show Info and Show Layers. The Photoshop window should look like the example shown.

Note that when the Info and Layer tools are displayed, the menu changes to Hide Info and Hide Layers

If you are working on a chronological set of images, choose the middle image of a set in order to work with images which are not too far apart in time. In this way, the landmarks will be easy to differentiate.

The images that you are going to use in this tutorial are located on the course CD in the week8 folder. They are called Hebron68.jpg, Hebron92.jpg, and you may also want to work with Hebron94.jpg.


5) Open the appropriate image (middle image of the set) in Photoshop. In this scenario, the image is Hebron68.jpg. It is located on the course CD in the week8 folder.

6) Control + (Open apple + on a mac) makes the image larger / Control - (Open Apple - on a mac) makes the image smaller. Make the image larger to about 66%. This is not a firm number, however it is important to begin to look at the data closely.

7) Set the canvas size. Note the default allows the image to remain in the center and the canvas gets larger all the way around the image. Set the width to 9 inches and the height to 14 inches in this scenario.

It is important to get the canvas larger than all the images so no loss of data will occur when copying other files into different layers. The size is arbitrary depending on the data you have.

8) Open the 2nd image (in this scenario hebron62.jpg) in Photoshop. Select All (Control A) and Copy it (Control C).

9) Close the 2nd image. Go to the base image of the 1st file you opened and Edit / Paste (Control V). The window will show layers. (Mac keyboard commands are: Command A, Command C and Command V for Select All, Copy and Paste respectively.)

10) Rename the top layer (Called Layer 1) and the Background so that you can distinguish between it and the base or background layer. This is done by double clicking in the Layer Tool and typing in the name.

Note that I named the layers according to the years of the data.

You are now ready to start the coregistering process by first finding accurate matching points. If you have a third image in your data set to coregister, repeat steps 8 through 10 to get the third image as a different layer.

Click here to continue.