How to Transform a Series of Photos into a Beautiful Panorama.
Posted by Rick Sader on September 20, 2010 at 1:21 pmMaybe you’ve run across a serene landscape, a bustling cityscape, or other fabulous vistas and thought what a great image that would make……but how? “It’s so large, my camera can’t capture it all, not even with a wide-angle lens.” As usual, Photoshop to the rescue. The last couple of versions of Photoshop make short work of producing long images.
A series of overlapping photos that span the entire scene can automatically be stitched together to produce one big, beautiful, contiguous image with no trace of seams. But there a few tips to keep in mind. Here they are:
First, make sure that the images overlap each other by about 25% or so. The software does its magic by matching up image elements in the scene, so lots of overlap will tend to produce better results. I’ve noticed I tend to use maybe a little bit more than is necessary. But I’m very happy with the results I’ve been able to achieve.
Second, a tripod will help you align the images properly. Without the tripod, you may have too much vertical offset between images. This will ultimately reduce the size of the final image since non-overlapping areas will get cropped away near the end of this process. But I have been able to get great results handheld.
Third, using a consistent exposure will make it easier for the software to smoothly blend the component images into a single image. This will be easier if your scene has an even tone. With larger tonal shifts, this will get trickier to control. Photoshop will perform a tonal blend as well as image element alignment between neighboring images. And you don’t want depth-of-field differences among the photos. If you feed Photoshop higher-quality images, it will be happier.
Once you have 3-5 overlapping images, fire up Photoshop and select File – Automate – Photomerge. You can then import the images to be blended. Next choose one of the blending algorithms Photoshop will use to make your panorama. I’m usually amazed at how well ‘auto’ works, but you can also choose ‘perspective’, ‘cyclindrical’, ‘spherical’, etc….. Experiment until you find one that you like best. Your image will be generated quickly and each component photo will now be on a separate layer. At this point, I usually flatten the image, crop away the unwanted areas around the perimeter, and then start playing with levels, curves, saturation, sharpening, etc….. (If you have CS5, the “content-aware fill” will produce amazing results).
Here’s an example using some photos I took 9-19-10. This first image shows the four component images all placed next to each other. You can tell that each image overlaps its neighbor by at least 25%. The sky was darker in the left image but the tone in the areas of overlap in neighboring photos was pretty consistent.
The second images shows these same four photos overlappped “manually”. That is, I merely dragged each photo into place based on my perception of lining up image elements. You can now see clearly the amount of overlap between neighboring images. You can also now get a sense of what the final panorama will look like.
And now…. the moment you’ve been waiting for. Here is the result of using Photoshop’s Photomerge command:
With a little planning and keeping a couple simple tips in mind, big, beautiful panoramic images are possible. Don’t forget to try capturing a number of images in portrait mode too to get more sky and/or foreground in your panorama. Hope this helps you get the images you want. Happy shooting.