Panorama

In this post I'm going to being giving you a step by step guide on how to create your own panoramic, through looking at one (with screenshots) that I made earlier!

What is a panoramic: A panoramic is basically a series of images that are manipulated in such a way as to make them seamless to create a long/large, continuous image to show a wide amount of a scene that couldn't usually be captured in the same way using any kind of lens.

 Below is a contact sheet of the images that I am going to transform into a panoramic.

 Firstly, before I start I would like to say that I could've manually done everything to transform these images into a panoramic, which would've included lots of cropping, fine tuning (including colours and contrast etc), stitching and blending but this stuff takes time and as we live in a fast paced society, with everything changing so fast I decided to experiment with the faster alternative. Also, Photoshop costs so much money you might as well let it work some of it's own magic, let it earn it's money! Right here's my step by step guide (I'm using Adobe Photoshop CS3 by the way.)

Before you start anything make sure that you have all of the images you want to include into the finished panoramic saved into one folder -as this makes things easier in a minute.

 ONE

 

So as you can see in the screenshot above you open Photoshop (and if you don't know how to do that it's not worth you looking on as this would be way over your head at this moment in time!) next you click on File, then go down to 'Automate' then select 'Photomerge'

TWO

Once you're in you click on the Browse button to select all of the files you want (which will all be conveniently in the same folder, if you followed my first instruction!) 

THREE

Once you have all of the files selected you can choose the 'Layout' which is basically telling Photoshop how to put the images together (in the screenshot above I have chosen 'Auto') once you are happy click on the OK button.

Photoshop will then run through the process automatically, you can sit and watch this if you like but it takes a while sometimes so I suggest a nice cup of tea and a digestive biscuit.

FOUR

Once Photoshop has finished doing it's thing you'll find Photoshop's 'finished document' opened in Photoshop, just like when you import images to photoshop yourself. The image will ususally look quite rough and need some cropping, just like the image in the screenshot above.

FIVE

At the end I always suggest zooming in and doing some last tweaks as the automatic process isn't as good as our eyes, especially when it comes to panoramics! I usually use the following tools to do this: Clone, Dodge, Burn, Spot Heal and Patch tool. In this screenshot I am using the Spot Heal tool.

 So that's the faster way of making a panoramic using Photoshop, don't forget to save at the end!

Here is my final panoramic, it looks a little crazy with half of a tree in one place and the bottom in the other, I've also lost a bench but this was down to selecting the wrong 'Layout' back before Photoshop did it's thing, I quite like the image like this as instead of being a true likeness of the area I photographed it has turnt into something new!

I did however go back and start the process from the beginning again to select a different 'layout' (this time I chose perspective) just to illustrate the difference between certain settings, my final image is below.

A panoramic that  is a true likeness of the area that I photographed, just so you can see it does work!

Below are some other panoramics that I've found on flickr that I just thought I'd share with you so you can get the full impact of what can be achieved.

Panoramic by Cory Lum

Panoramic by Dibyendu Das Photography 

Panoramic by ragega!!ery™