Creating a panorama in Photoshop

This is a technique more for Photoshop than it is for photography.

Basically, the technique is to take a bunch of photographs in series that will make up a panoramic view. The images are then stitched together in Photoshop to make a panorama.

The camera is set up on a tripod and the camera base is levelled using a spirit level. This is done so that when the camera is panned, the image is in a flat plane … that’s something that I realised after taking these photos (tee hee).

The images are taken in series so that there is very little (if any) difference in exposure levels.

So we start with four images.

Make sure that when taking the photographs, you leave an overlap in the images so that Photoshop has an easier time aligning the images.

Next, start up Photoshop  and select File > Automate > Photomerge. This loads the automation interface for creating a panoramic view.

Browse and select your source images and make sure that the check box “Attempt to automatically arrange source images” is checked. This makes sure that the images are loaded in sequence.

Click on the OK button. Photoshop will then attempt to merge the images together into a new image (with the interestingly apposite layer name of Photomerge).

Now you need to crop out the bits that don’t fit into the picture … do some guide tweaking and selecting and then crop the image so that you end up with a satisfying image.

I think that Photoshop did a pretty good job of stitching