Photography Magazine

If you have read the introductory article on Panoramic photography you may wish to give a better, more professional looking finish to your panoramas than to simply stick the images on card. There is of course a digital way to do this. In fact there is more than one digital way. Let us look at the Photoshop way for a start. This is of course assuming that the reader already has a basic knowledge of this image editing software’s applications and controls and commands. If not, it would be pretty difficult to get into digital panoramic photography at all and we would suggest a few weeks oh Photoshop tutorials and practice first.If you have 3 images to be stitched, open them all in Photoshop. Any version of the software would work for this. Check out the size of your images. Make a horizontal box so 3 images would easily fit into it. If your images at 640 by 480 resolution for example, you would want a box of 640 height (at least) and around 1500 length roughly. We will make it the appropriate size later.

Drag and drop all three images into this horizontal box and select appropriate layers to adjust the layers 1,2 and 3 (or however you have chosen to name them) so that they align to make your panorama. More often than not, when you shoot hand held panoramas, your images would probably appear to fit in a zig zag manner, with some higher than the previous and some lower. Do not worry about this just yet. We shall get to shooting perfect panoramas in a later article. For the time being we shall simply crop away the ‘extra area’ using the crop tool on Photoshop, resulting in a neat Panorama’.

Do note that you may have to adjust the tonal values brightness and contrast on certain images for them to match seamlessly. This is more common when you have photographed using the auto mode of the camera, so try and shoot using a manual camera mode (where it is  possible) and set the same exposure for all images of the panorama. Anyway, we shall get back to perfect panoramas later, as mentioned earlier. Let us get the basics first.

So - now we have a 3 ’stitched’ images, with one or more probably out of horizontal level. So, use the crop tool to cut off the additional area and you will have something that looks much better.

Easy wasn’t that? Try and experiment with 4 or 5 or even more images that you stitch using photoshop. You will soon learn to get your images more or less aligned even with hand held photography. Once you have a couple of perfect horizontal panoramas, you could get them printed at a lab and cut away the white area to leave a panoramic print. The prints can then be mounted and framed to decorate your interiors. Remember, like everything else, practice makes perfect where panoramic stitching is concerned.