layer puzzle

There is this magnificent underpass on the local freeway that I consider to be very beautiful. The concrete is aged and marked with texture, and the entire mass is gently curved for hundreds of meters.
I tried to photograph this yesterday with my digital camera.
Of course, it is much too big to be captured with one image, so I figured the solution was to take enough pics to reassemble the structure in Photoshop.
It came out to 5 overlapping layers, and after doing the various perspective changes and little tweaks like enlarging areas, adjusting chroma and contrast, I was ready to join the sections together and use the clone tool only as a last resort.
The first and second layers, starting at the far left of the image were first.
I erased the second layer's overlap with a 100 pixel (airbrush) eraser at 6%, and it worked beautifully. I merged visible on those layers and then tried to do the same thing with layer 3, BUT IT DIDN'T WORK ! ! ! !
Layer 3 keeps erasing to the background color, as does layer 4.
Layer 5 erases to clear, as did layer 2 before I merged it with layer 1.

So there is something really strange going on here. Photoshop has never done this before. What can possibly be wrong ?

This is a very large image, 64 inches by 16 inches, and while the native resolution of the jpg photos is only 72dpi, this is still pretty fat and I thought possibly the ram was somehow challenged. I had 640 mb of ram the last time I checked, and it is a 1.5 ghz P4, with a mostly empty 60gb hard drive.
I just tried dropping the size to 32 x 8 and there was no difference in how the layers erase.
I love Photoshop, but not when it does this to me.

I'm not exactly sure what your problem is, but what I would do is arrange them all together and adjust brightness/contrast and rotate them and everything while they're all separate layers. Then put those layers into a set and duplicate the set. Hide one set (a backup) and merge the other set all into one layer. Then you can set about working with the clone tool, healing brush, and patch tool to get the transistions looking like they never existed. At various stages you can duplicate and hide the layer so that it can be a backup in case you mess up and want to go back. Then when you're done, crop it down, save it for web, and then undo the crop so that you have the full-size image in your .psd.

/me wants to try and do one now! :D good luck

First off, make sure you're using the default Eraser tool. Then make sure if the layer 3 and 4 actually overlaps something; if it's not, then it will still erase to clear and the background layer comes into view (which, not coincidentally, is the same color as the background color).

Thanks for the suggestions.
I tried all sorts of things until I got the original photos and made new layers with them. Presto changeo !
They worked like they were supposed to.
BECAUSE (I think) there is only so much stretching and distortion "allowed" to the image on a layer before it becomes like a flattened image all by itself on a layer.
The problem of this large picture was to keep the curve of the stretch of concrete intact, and that was ultimately solved by breaking each of the sections into vertical bar-like slices, each which was then given the perspective, skew, etc. adjustment.
As long as you don't go beyond a certain limit on the distortion (when you have exceeded that limit you will know, but its just a guess how much is too much) then you can proceed normally. But the safe way to do this takes much more time, and there is probably another corollary of Murphy's Law lurking in there somewhere !

Thanks, and this problem is solved ! ! ! ! :D

Would you like to post the final image here?

I would be happy to !

:D

Very nice. Looks a little blurry in some places on the wall in the middle, but I didnt notice until looking at it for a while. Is that the biggest size or did you scale it down?

And did you take those photos on your photos page?

Thankyou.
This is the first clumsy attempt, brought on by the Spirit images. I had to scale it down 3 times. The full Photoshop version is 54x14 inches @72dpi after cropping.
(The first try at posting in a jpg format covered 4 webpages.)
I think that in order to avoid ANY kind of blurring you must be far more careful than I was on this one, but it was only a see-if-I-can-do-it.

One thing I learned is that my digital camera has a wide-angle lens distortion that you must continually struggle to counteract ! This might actually be worth going back to a 35mm camera for the choice of focal lengths, but could also work better by walking further to photograph in each direction of the tunnel, so that there is no big bump in the middle.

I am embarrassed to say that I have been banging my head on Dreamweaver for several years with nothing to show for it ! The website was a ready-made, and the pictures on the second page came with it. Not that they aren't decent pictures, but they are nothing like what I do, and they only serve to mark those locations for replacement images, which means possibly more to follow. :D

That's wonderful, BigK! I appreciate the time you put into that (I'm sure we, here, understand that even more than outsiders!).

Thanks ! :D
Even as I write this post, I am starting my day with a steaming bowl of fresh pixels ! ! So nutritious, and good for you ! !