Create Panoramic Images

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PSDTUTS Photoshop Wiki / Photoshop Tutorials / Create Panoramic Images

Many photographers enjoy taking photographs of landscapes for the purposes of creating a panoramic image later on. Those in accommodation and tourism industries also use panoramic images quite frequently, so you can have a “3D tour” of the premises online. They’re not really 3D, but being able to preview a room as if you were really there has proven to be a useful sales tactic. Using Photoshop, you can stitch together a series of photographs of, for instance, a landscape, to form a panoramic image.

It sounds like a fairly complicated process, but it’s actually quick and quite easy. The hardest part is in touching up any misalignments or changes in brightness between shots.

1. Take photographs of the landscape you wish to stitch together. Ensure each photograph has some overlap on either side. Three shots are best.
2. Place each shot as a new layer in a Photoshop image. It helps to name these layers carefully so there’s no confusion as to which order they’re supposed to go in. For a standard set of three, Left, Center and Right are good names.
3. Your bottom layer may be locked – ensure you unlock it before doing this. Select your layers, starting with the middle image and then selecting those on either side.
4. Select the Move tool and click the “Auto-Align Layers” button in the Options Bar. This will bring up a dialogue box—the Perspective option is usually appropriate for panoramic images.
5. You may need to adjust the brightness and contrast of your image, since you may capture different levels of light in each photograph. Once you’ve done this, crop your image down so that it’s a rectangle, instead of a strange shape surrounded by transparent areas.
6. If the photos haven’t lined up exactly right, you may need to do some cutting, moving and erasing to get better alignment on the edge of each photograph. One option is to use the Rotate Image tool to adjust the image until the overlap is fairly seamless – then any smaller inconsistencies can be fixed using the Healing Brush or something similar.

A quicker option may be to use the Photomerge tool, which can be found under the menu option File > Automate > Photomerge. You may prefer the hands-on control of using the Auto-Align Layers tool. If you do use Photomerge, make sure to uncheck the Merge option. If Photoshop merges the image, this will remove any option to rotate or move images later on and it may be much harder to repair inconsistencies.

[edit] Related Links

• Easy Integration Between Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS4 Jerry Courvoisier demonstrates how to use the merge to panoramic feature when integrating between Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS4 to blend images seamlessly and produce a panoramic.
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