Photo Corners headlinesarchivemikepasini.com
A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.
You Know the Drill
15 September 2025
We took this shot two weeks ago and just kept thinking about it. It was taken in the almost complete darkness of a tool cabinet with only the ambient light of dusk filtering in from a small window in the garage.
Hand Drill. Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max back camera using Project Indigo at 6.8mm, f1.8, 1/5 second and ISO 3200. Processed in Photoshop.
An impossible shot, in short. But using Adobe's Project Indigo camera app to composite several images, building up the exposure without noise, we had a credible image of this old tool.
It's a hand drill. Not too long ago it saved our bacon when the old batteries for a DeWalt power drill were too dead to charge. We tightened a drill bit in this baby, which has been in the family at least three generations, and got the job done.
That's two thirds of the story.
The last piece of the story is what we did with the image in Photoshop. We used the Ruler tool to draw a line down the center of the drill and then rotated the image arbitrarily, which uses the angle of the line we drew as the amount. That straightened the drill.
Then we took it to Camera Raw to optimize the exposure a bit. Indigo had given us a sharp but dark image. Camera Raw gave us a brighter image.
Back to Photoshop to crop the image so the drill appears centered in the frame. That left a triangle along the top left from the rotation but we also had to extend the canvas, creating a good deal of empty space along the entire right side.
For the triangle we used the Healing brush to fill in the background texture. But for the right side, we used Content Aware Fill, which figured out the plywood pattern and applied it to the empty space.
In short, we created an image we could not have captured or edited just a little while ago. An impossible image. That is entirely credible.