Tips for Shooting Panoramas, Part 1

RANDY HUFFORD

There is something so fascinating about what happens when you stitch together five or six (or more) landscape photos into one long, single image. It's as close as you can get (with a photograph anyway) to recreating the experience of being there. However, when it comes to creating these panoramic images, it can be either a piece of cake or a huge nightmare, and it's almost entirely based on how you shoot the panorama in the first place. Do it right and Photoshop will stitch the whole thing together for you with little or no input from you at all. Do it wrong and you'll be working your butt off for hours to try to get your pano together, and Photoshop will mock you every step of the way. Now, although this will take more than one page to describe, shooting panos right is easyyou just have to follow the rules that make it easy to assemble the separate photos into one seamless image in Photoshop. Here we go:

1.	Shoot your pano on a tripod. If you don't, you'll pay.
2.	Shoot vertically (in portrait orientation) rather than horizontally (in landscape orientation). It'll take more shots to cover the same area, but you'll have less edge distortion and a better looking pano for your extra effort.
3.	Switch your camera's white balance to Cloudy. If you leave it set to Auto, your white balance may (will) change between segments, which is bad, bad, bad.
4.	There's morego to the next page...