Photoshop CS3 - Align and Blend

I've been messing around with Adobe Photoshop's latest CS3. There are some new, powerful tools and I can't wait to dive in deeper.

For now here's a quick little something:

Four individual images

After taking four shots of my new tattoo, I've pulled up all of them and placed each one into the same new document. Then I selected all of the layers and chose CS3's new Auto-Align function:
(Edit > Auto-Align Layers)

Great for panoramic photography, I wanted to see how it would work piecing together a tattoo on a three dimensional service.

For Projection I left it on "Auto". I'm curious to try out different setting. But for now here goes.

After Auto-Align

Photoshop does its best to find the median amongst all of what you throw at it. Then it aligns them by skewing, resizing, and piecing everything together. After viewing the results, I checked each layer and moved them around to fit the placement a bit more precisely.

Now, I selected all of the layers again and used CS3's new Auto-Blend mode. (Edit > Auto-Blend Layers).

After Auto-Blend

Finally, I just cropped the final blend and here you have it:

There are some tiny mishaps, and color balance is uncomfortable in some places. I'm sure if I went back in and tweaked around, this whole thing could be close to pristine. Also, viewing a tattoo like this (flattened and two dimensional) feels a little odd (the piece was created to be viewed three dimensionally), but the prospects are interesting.