Stitched Panoramas with Photoshop's Photomerge

With Photoshop's Photomerge automation, you can shoot high-resolution panoramic photos. Getting it to work smoothly takes a little practice buy with a few simple steps on the shooting end, the merged images will interact seamlessly together.

The first challenge is to determine the correct exposure and white balance. The camera must not be set on anything automatic. If the focus, exposure or white balance is set on auto, the camera's automatic features will slightly shift the focal point, exposure and color to reflect what it is pointing at. As you point the camera from one view to the next, the changing exposure will make the merging of the images look splotchy. If photographing in the daytime, set the white balance on daylight or cloudy. For more critical color, do a custom white balance of the area you are shooting. You can hold the camera vertical for doing horizontal panoramas to capture more top to bottom height if needed. Remember you can always make it as wide as you want by taking more photos from left to right.

Each image needs to have about a 1/3 overlap of the scene with the next image. Overlapping too much or too little makes it harder to get seamless stitching. When shooting, try to keep the camera as level as possible. Aligning the horizon of the scene with the centerline of the camera viewfinder will help keep the scene level. Do a practice run of looking through the camera and viewing the scene stopping at each area to shoot. This will help to determine what to look for in the scene to help as a guide to line up against. A tripod can be used to get cleaner overlapping images. The more level and even the photographs, the better the stitching.

The proper exposure should be a balance of the brightest and darkest area in the full subject area. Example: If the area on the far left of the scene was showing a proper exposure reading of 1/125 at F-8, and the exposure on the right side was reading 1/125 at F-11, set the camera on manual exposure at 1/125 at F-8 ½. If you are shooting several attempts of the same subject, shoot a blank image at the beginning and end of each run. It will make it easier to determine where to start and stop the process in Photoshop.

Once the images are photographed, gather them in a folder and view them in The Bridge (Photoshop CS File Browser). Holding the Shift key, click on the first and last file in the sequence to select them. If they need to rotate, do that at this time by clicking the rotate icon to make the stitching process easier to manage. From the Bridge menu, choose Tools>Photoshop>Photomerge (In Photoshop CS, choose Automate>Photomerge from the File Browser menu). The images automatically open themselves up and set up in the Photomerge dialog box.

If shot correctly, the images will automatically set themselves up correctly for the stitching. Sometimes even though they were shot correctly, Photoshop has a hard time figuring out what do to with them. You can then click on each image and adjust them individually. Try to line up the images by looking at the overlapped areas. When the two images get close, they will automatically snap together. Once the image is finished and cropped, it can be adjusted as any other image to finish up. The images are much larger in resolution because you are using several of the images together. Even small point and shoot digital cameras can make large panoramas this way. Next time you are out creating images, try a few to get the feel of doing stitched panoramas.

Sunday, August 20,2006 through
Thursday, August 24, 2006

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Join Helene, Jim and ten (10) other instructors at their 5-day, hands-on workshops in August at the Niagara School of Imaging from Sunday August 20 to Thursday August 24, 2006 at Brock University in Niagara Falls, Canada.

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