Creating a Killer Panorama

Believe it or not, a lot of people don't know that Photoshop can automatically stitch your photos together for you to create a panorama. If you continue reading this, then I'm guessing you fall into the "believe it" category and that's fineyou're why I've included this tutorial here. Honestly, when I show people where this feature is and that it's really called Photomerge instead of Create Panorama, they always say, "I saw that but I just never thought to use it for a panorama."

Step One

Open Bridge and select the photos you want to include in this pano. (By the way, the word pano is pro-speak for panorama. You know those pros, right? They just hate saying the full word.) Once you have the photos selected, choose Tools>Photoshop>Photomerge. The photos are then opened and assembled automatically. Photoshop will think for a moment as it tries to stitch the photos together. If you're lucky, the first dialog you see after this will be the Photomerge dialog and this will tell you that everything has gone okayso far.

©MATT KLOSKOWSKI

Turbo Boost

Another great speed tip to help your panorama photos out before you even get into Photoshop is to shoot the photos vertically, not horizontally, and overlap each one by approximately 15%.

If you're unlucky and the composition can't be automatically assembled, a warning appears onscreen letting you know. Have no fear, thoughyou can always create the composition manually in the Photomerge dialog using the Lightbox at the top of the dialog. This is where you can make some specific decisions on how Photoshop treats the merged photos.

Step Two

The first area to check out on the right side of the Photomerge dialog is the Settings section. Most of the time, you'll wind up leaving this set to Normal. Perspective is used when you're shooting a pano that is 180 or 360° around. Now, if you do shoot one of those panos and click on the Perspective radio button, you'll see another option become available called Cylindrical Mapping in the Composition Settings section. Turn on this checkbox to reduce the bowed distortion that can appear when shooting these types of panos.

Turbo Boost

Even though Photoshop can work wonders on your panoramas, it's best to give them a good start. If you really want to speed up the panorama stitching process, then make sure you shoot your photos on a tripod.

Step Three

Finally, lighting conditions can cause various issues in your stitched photos. Sometimes the auto exposure settings on your camera can cause seams to become visible between photos. Turning on the Advanced Blending checkbox, in the Composition Settings section, can sometimes help alleviate these seams. Be sure to click the Preview button to see if it makes things better or worse. One more thing...let's say you want to keep each image in the pano separate from each other so you can edit them individually in Photoshop. Just turn on the Keep as Layers checkbox at the bottom of the dialog. You'll want to select this option if you think you'll need to do some color or lighting correction on individual photos.

You can't select Keep as Layers and Advanced Blending at the same time. You'll need to make a decision as to which one you'd rather use.

Turbo Boost

When you're creating a panorama using Photomerge, you can save the stitch options and progress by pressing the Save Composition As button in the top-right corner.

Step Four

When you're done, just click OK and Photoshop will process the photos and build your panorama. It may take a few minutes depending on the number and size of your photos. When it's done you'll see the panorama open in Photoshop.

Step Five

The last thing you may need to do to finish this off is to straighten and crop the pano. Straightening photos in Photoshop CS2 (which is really easy, by the way) is covered in Chapter 9 on page 186. As for cropping, you'll most likely see some transparent areas on the top or bottom of the image. Just select the Crop tool (C) and crop the image so those areas are gone.

Turbo Boost

When creating a pano, 16-bits-per-channel images and 32-bits-per-channel images are converted to 8-bits-per-channel images.