On Tue, 2008-02-19 at 13:37 -0400, Rich wrote:

Hi,

I was trying to stack some photos with different focal points to create one image that's all in focus (close-up and macro shots).

Is there a way to make the perspective tool xor the other layers. This would help for other situations as well, when you need to adjust or overlap exposures and stitching photos together (panoramic shots).

Gimp is not designed to do panoramic stitching. But there are some tools that may be used either separately from gimp or as a plug-in. The comprehensive set of tools for doing this sort of things is called Panorama Tools, and it has various gui interfaces. I work under Linux and the one I use is called hugin. There are others which work under Windows or on a Mac. A good place to start for information is wiki.panotools.org. There is also a very yahoo group http://groups.yahoo.com/ which is ready to offer help.

These tools are very powerful. they allow you to take separate images and then adjust them for virtually everything you might imagine. They even correct for pincushion and barrel distortion. But they require a serious investment in time to master. The above web site will has links to tutorials for getting started.

There is also a gimp plugin which may be used for simpler cases. You can find information about it at www.shallowsky.com/software/pandora/ This works well where the images don't require significant adjustments in order to be patched together. But you may first have to adjust the component images by using suitable transformations. Akkana Peck, who wrote the Pandora script, explains how to use gimp for stitching panoramas in her book Beginning Gimp, which I strongly recommend.

Thanks
Rich

Gimp 2.4.4
Slackware 12.1(beta)