Photography Magazine

Ok - you’ve got your self a panoramic tripod head. You’ve aligned it to suit your camera-lens combination (it is a good idea to mark the position of the brackets so you do not have to go through the painful process of aligning your camera and lens every time you have to shoot a panorama). You’ve also found a great landscape or interior location to shoot your panorama. You mount your camera on the tripod using your panoramic tripod head. You shoot your 360 degree (or partial) panorama. Now comes the painful task of stitching together the images on  manual software, right? Wrong! There are dedicated software on the market for this very task. And what’s more, they also publish your images in variable formats. Once you have the shooting mastered, you need to invest into a good panoramic software. This technology was first introduced by Apple USA, on their VR WORX software that played panoramas on the Apple Quicktime player. Today there are a number of software available on the market to stitch and publish your work. We will not deal with any specific software here, but speak of the basic principles behind every one of them. Any panorama software involves the execution of three basic steps mentioned below.

The Shooting Stage

This involves positioning the camera and lens on a tripod with a panoramic head (as mentioned in earlier tutorials). Whatever the software you will be using to stitch together your images, it will never work (just as you will never be able to manually stitch the images either) unless the camera was positioned at the optic center of the lens while shooting. Different software will call for different shooting methods - some will ask for images of top, down, left, right, front and back, some will ask for panoramic images shot rotating the tripod head clockwise, etc. But remember, in every case the camera and lens first need to be mounted correctly on the tripod.

The Stitching Stage

Now ends the hard work and now begins the fun! When you have photographed the required images, you load them on to the panorama software and click away. Usually the stitching is completely automated while you sit back and relax.

The Publishing Stage

Next you will need to publish your panorama… you could choose to publish it as a jpg for print format. On the other hand you could choose to publish it on the web, so as to make an interactive panorama. Interactive panoramas invite a user to click and drag with the mouse so as to be able to ‘look’ this way or that, giving them the feeling of standing in a room or at a location and looking around. This has today become the norm to market real estate in most developed countries. To view the published Panoramas on a web page, the user usually needs a JAVA enabled computer or a FLASH player. But let us not get involved with the graphic design stage…

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.