Creating a Panorama in Photoshop

This photo, taken across the bay at Llandudno after sunset, is ‘stitched together’ from several individual pictures. It was one of my first attempts – so don’t be too harsh about the quality of the image! (It could do with some more processing in Photoshop)

This tutorial, when finished, is going to

give you some photographic tips I learned in the process
show you how to use PhotoShop to create the final panoramic image.

Taking the pictures;

This was one of my first attempts creating a panorama. Some of the things I learned – which you won’t necesarily find mentioned in other tutorials!

Use a tripod. I know this sounds obvious, but it keeps the height and orientation of the camera consistent across all images. If your tripod has a built-in spirit level, make sure it’s set flat. If you haven’t one of these tripods, get a small spirit level and rest it across the tripod.
Choose the correct lens or zoom setting. Don’t use a wide angle, as the edges will be distorted and the ‘stitching’ won’t work properly. 50-80mm is ideal. If you’re using a zoom, make sure you don’t adjust the zoom setting whilst taking the pictures.
Set the camera to manual. First of all, set it to aperture priority and choose something like f22, so that there’s a good depth of field. Look at the scene and try to determine what the average light setting is – you can use your camera to help in this. This will give you the shutter speed. Once you’ve determined this, set the camera to manual, using f22 and the shutter speed.
If you have a lens with vibration reduction – TURN IT OFF!! You don’t need this when the camera’s on the tripod and it can actually introduce camera shake – the last thing you want. If you could zoom in on the origianal images used in this panorama, you would see that some of the buildings are slightly blurred.
Mount the camera in portrait mode – this will give you more information in your picture (you can always crop the end result).
Use a remote trigger or cable release. Again, this can prevent camera shake from the simple act of pressing the button.
Start at the left of your panorama, take the first shot.
Move the camera to the right so that the image in the viewfinder overlaps the previous image by about 25 – 30%.
Continue until you have captured all the images.

There’s nothing to stop you repeating the process with a different shutter spee/aperture combination!

Stitching the images together.

If I was charging for these photographs, I’d love to be able to say that this process is really difficult – but the opposite’s true – it’s REALLY EASY! If you’re using Photoshop CS4 or above, that is. CS2 is nowhere near as good.

Open Photoshop
Choose ‘Browse in Bridge’ from the file menu.
Go to the folder where the images are stored.
Select images and 'Group As Stack'

Click on the first image (the one taken at the left of the panorama) and Shift + Click on the last image. All the images between these two points will be selected.
Go to the ‘Stacks’ menu and choose ‘Group as Stack’ (or just press Ctrl + G). The display changes, as below; all the images are stacked, taking up less display space. You can see other examples in the screenshot. The stack shows how many pictures are within it – in this case 5.
Stacked images
Open the stack (or you will get an error message saying more then 1 image is required), go to Tools | PhotoShop | Photomerge, as shown below.
Select Photomerge
After a moment, the following window will open. Note I’ve left the ‘auto’ option on - with more familiarity, you may want to experiment with sifferent settings to achieve different effects. Select all the images and click ‘OK’
list of images to be merged
Depending on the power of your computer and the amount of memory in it, the following will appear eventually, showing how the separate images have been joined. Notice at the right of the window, each image has been placed on its own layer.
the images stitched together on separate layers
If you hide one of the layers you will see that Photoshop does an incredible job trying to get similar pixels to create the join between two images – it’s not a straight slice!
One layer hidden to show the 'stitching'
If you’re happy with the stitching, you can continue in several ways;
Crop the image to suit
crop the image to suit
From here, you might want to flatten the layers, add a gradient to the sky, blend any imperfections out of the picture etc etc – that will depend on your own image.