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.

When you think of panoramic photography, the image of a horizontally long photograph comes to mind. Panorama is nothing new to the world of photography. Its been around for almost as long as the art of photography itself, but it is also true that this form of photography has evolved just like everything else. Let us get into the basics of panoramic photography.

Panorama was earlier done using an extra long bit of sheet film and a lens with more than average field of view. If you do not really know what that means, dont worry about it. Today you can make panoramic images with any film or digital camera, and digital does make things easier where image stitching is concerned. On that note, let us learn a little about image stitching which is the basis of panoramic photography. Try this for a start - place your camera on a tripod and shoot your first photograph as you normally would. Then, rotate the tripod head to the right and frame your second shot making sure that the two photographs overlap each other to about 25% at least. You could shoot a third and a fourth image as well. The resulting images would look something like this…

It is easy to see now, that the 3 images can simply be combined to make one panoramic imahe. But how do you actually ’stitch’ the images together? We shall get to the stitching options later. For this introductory exercise, let us simply make 3 prints and paste them on a hardboard or something similar, so it is understood what is required. Do not be put off if your first attempt does not immediately provide good results. One thing you need to keep in mind is to make sure your tripod head is aligned well. For this purpose, a tripos head with a spirit level would work well. It is possible to shoot a series of overlapping images hand held, with care - but it would never be perfect shooting this way. In any case, if you stitch your 3 or 4 images together by sticking them side by side so that the overlapping areas create a panoramic effect, you would have something like this as a result -

 Do note that the images have been photographed vertically so that one has the maximum vertical field of view or coverage. We have the luxury to shoot as many images as needed to cover the horizontal axis, so let us always remember that the vertical axis is not being stitched, and so we shoot with the camera held (or mounted to the tripod) vertically. Go ahead and experiment with image stitching to get the feel of panoramic photography. Every photographer remembers the excitement on creating his or her first pano stitch. The images above have been photographed hand held. One can see where the stitch is not perfect, but this is probably what your first few stitches would turn out as. Try sticking your images on a black card to create exciting panoramic cityscapes and landscapes.