With the always evolving technology becoming smarter and more efficient, digital photo editing has vastly improved as well. Moving from the film darkroom to Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, has made photography manipulation easier for creative artists to produce any ideas that would come to mind. In the recent year, 360 camera’s have been the newest way of capturing moments by allowing you to revisit what was filmed and played back with 360 degrees of video record in real time. In our travels, most of us take photos of views and places that are breathtaking, but don’t always translate the view in the images we took. Stitching of images together to create panorama’s, help allow us to revisit those places we stopped to take a photo of in a surreal image. Adobe Photoshop along with some work in Lightroom has made taking these several dozen images and combining them a breeze.

Taking the photos

The best way to prepare for taking a series of images with the idea of stitching them together to create a panorama is figuring out what the final image should look like. Photo Merging can be the traditional way that you would think of a panorama, with a long width and shorter height, or perhaps a square image with the same amount of width as height. Taking the series of images regardless of shape and size, can best be taken with a tripod and with an optional panning head, to allow a smooth transition between image to image. The tripod will allow for a steady image to be taken but as well as keeping track of where the last image was taken. The best way to insure all the images needed to create the panorama are taken, work similar to a computer scanner. Starting on the left taking an image, panning right to include the previous image a little in the next photo, working towards your desired end point. Images would appear such as those shown below.

Stitching the Images

Once the images are taken and placed onto your computer from your camera, work in Photoshop begins. Once Photoshop is loaded, without any document needing to be created, head over to the automate section under file and select Photo-merge as shown in the screenshot to the right. A window will appear with options and an file selector to begin the photo merging process. Add all the images that were taken for the panorama, and select a layout if desired that would best fit the images taken and the final composition. Photoshop from this point will take the images and create a document around combined images. Depending on the images and the desired look of the panorama, the merging options will depend on your preference, Adobe has a guide that explains each of the layout options as well as a couple new options in the latest Adobe Photoshop version.

Finishing it up

As Photoshop begins to merge the images, depending on how many images, the resolution of the images and the computer, the final composition may take a couple hours. Once the stitching is finished combining together, the images will be loaded as layers in Photoshop creating one composition as seen below in the screenshot. The results depending will not always be perfect and will most likely need to be tweaked and fixed by hand in Photoshop. The composition then can be brought into Adobe Lightroom or any photo editor for final touches if desired. The process of merging the images can be time consuming and also difficult depending on the images angles and how well the photos merge. The final images are breath taking and can capture scenery and landscapes that allow the viewer to be immersed in the images

Camera
NIKON D5100
Focal Length
18mm
Aperture
f/8
Exposure
1/250s
ISO
140
Panorama of Old Sakonnet River Bridge in October of 2017 before construction begins to demolish the bridge that connects Aquidneck Island and Tiverton, Rhode IslandShare this: