Simple Panorama
Panorama is a pretty much hit-or-miss feature. While on one hand there are cameras like the Kodak's V series that do an excellent job of shooting and stitching wide panorama shots together, there are other cameras that do assist you in taking the consecutive shots, but require you to use an external application, or a bundled one to stitch the picture for you. In case you hate the idea of bulking up your PC with unnecessary single-purpose applications like I do, Photoshop CS3 has an excellent stitching utility built into it.
But before we get to that, you need to click the right images. If your camera supports panorama shooting, then the job gets easier for you, but even if it doesn't, it's pretty easy to take the right shots. All you need to do is place your camera on a tripod or a flat surface and click shots in a horizontal direction (from left to right or vice versa). I will be using the shots below clicked on a terrace.
The main thing you need to take care of is to shoot the pictures without flash, as variable lighting can spoil a panorama. There seems to be a bit of an exposure shift from my first to my second image, which I 'm afraid may cause a slight variation.
Also make sure to leave in a bit of edge from the previous shot in the next one, to give the stitching application something to play around with. Moreover, try not to have people in the edges of any of your shots, because when the shots will be stitched together, the people at the edges may appear halved or distorted.
Now that the shots are ready start Adobe Photoshop CS3. Go to File > Automate > Photomerge to bring up the Photomerge window. There you can define the layout that will best shoot your shots. I would suggest you stick to Automatic, as that works best most of the time.
Under Files, simply select the images that you wish to stitch together and make sure that the Blend Images Together check box is selected. Once done, click on Ok and watch Photoshop create new image with multiple layers to blend the images together.
The image below is what we got. You can notice how a shift in lighting has created a line of separation in the image below. Otherwise the stitching done by Photoshop is near perfect. Nonetheless our first priority now, is to get rid of the areas on the top and bottom.
Which is where cropping comes in. Just select the Crop tool from the side bar and select the area without any of the empty spaces.
Once the area is selected, press Enter on your keyboard to crop it. This is what our end result looked like.
That's it for now, watch out for more articles in this series on Tech2. You can discuss this feature or even post article requests in the comments below as well as on our forums.
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