Easily Create Stunning Panoramic Images Without an Expensive Lens
Tutorial Details
- Difficulty: Beginner
- Program: Photoshop CS3 or Later
Panoramic photography is the process of capturing an extremely wide field of view into a single photograph either by using specialized equipment, or specialized software. Today we’ll be looking at the latter of those two and examining how you can create your very own panoramic images with Adobe Photoshop, using almost any camera and lens.
Understanding Panoramic Photography
The word “panorama” was coined in the 1780′s by an Irish artist named Robert Barker. He used the word to describe a technique which had invented for painting a scene on the inside of a large cylinder, creating the illusion of a natural 360 degree view to anyone standing at the center.
There is no official divide between wide-angle photography and panoramic photography, but it’s a generally accepted rule that panoramic photographs take in approximately the field of view visible by the human eye, or slightly more. The purpose of panoramic photography is to capture an entire scene rather than just a single portion of it. For this reason it’s a popular technique amongst landscape photographers in particular.
Outside of the truly specialized panoramic lenses, you’ve probably already seen what the more common fisheye lens can do, pulling in the world around it and distorting it into a round shape. Often used in skateboarding and other extreme sports photography, fisheye lenses are the first step to getting the whole scene into the photograph while remaining close to the subject.
True panoramic photography, however, does not distort the entire image as much as fisheye lenses typically do. Where the fisheye expands the field of view both horizontally and vertically, generally speaking the focus of panoramic photography is only horizontal. Of course landscapes aren’t the only subject suited to this style of photography, all the birds flocked around the lake in the picture above are a perfect example of expanding the field of view for a good reason.
Creating Your Own Panoramic Image
If you come across a scene which you think would be perfectly suited to a very wide-angle panoramic image, then you can create one almost completely regardless of what camera or lens you have with you. The only real limitation is that the scene which you want to photograph has to be static. You’re going to need to take multiple photographs of the same location, which won’t work if there’s a lot of movement within the frame.
Step 1
The first thing you’re going to need to do is find a good location to take your shots from. What you’re going to do is stand in a single place, and then take photos starting at one side and working your way over to the other. Preferably you should us a tripod for this and rotate it around on the same spot, however it’s not essential. Either way, you need to be somewhere where you have ample space to turn around and your view isn’t obstructed in any direction.
I was in Spain recently on a bloggers press trip organized by the Land of Valencia and happened to find this rather nice spot at the top of a nearby mountain overlooking Benidorm, so this is where I stood.
Step 2
Now you need to take all the photos which are going to make up your panoramic photograph. The easiest thing to do here is to start at the left, and pick out a landmark on the right hand side of your frame. Take the shot, then move that landmark from the right hand side of the frame to left hand side.
Pick out a new landmark on the right, take the shot, and continue. This ensures that all the photos which you take will overlap properly without leaving any gaps between them.
Pay close attention to how you’re standing, try to keep the camera level and follow the horizon to make sure you don’t go up or down as you pan across.
Here are the photos which I took from the above location, which you’ll see have quite a large overlap. Realistically you don’t have to allow that much overlap, but it’s always better to waver on the side of caution. Too much overlap is better than not enough overlap – also known as gaps!
Step 3
The next step is to post process all the images in your series, but remember that you have to process them all in the same way or they won’t match up. If you add vibrancy and sharpening to one shot then you need to apply the same effects in the same amounts to all the other photos to stay consistent. A Photoshop actionmight help with this!
Step 4
Now we’re going to open up Adobe Photoshop (CS3 or higher). Make sure that you don’t have any files open in Photoshop, then select File > Automate > Photomerge. You can experiment with the different photo merging modes, however for most standard applications the Auto option will suffice.
Browse to the location where all the images to be blended are stored and add them to the dialog box.
Step 5
Hit the OK button, then give Photoshop a few minutes to work its magic. Some pretty hefty processing work is involved here, especially when working with large images from DSLR cameras. Once it’s finished you should end up with something like this:
Step 6
Choose the Crop tool (C) and then select the area inside the edges of the shape to find the composition of your final image. Once you’re happy with the selection, press enter, and you’re done!
The Final Image
There you have it, a full (and in this case, rather large) panoramic image created by stitching together multiple images. The best part is that each photo is still at full resolution, so if you wanted to print this then you could get it done at a seriously large size. Click here to see a bigger version of the final image.
This simple technique can come in handy for creating some really stunning panoramic images. Now that you know how to do it, make sure you’re always keeping an eye out for potential scenes which would be suited to this technique.
Finally, if you’ve taken any really great panoramic photographs yourself then we would absolutely love to see them so please do drop us a link in the comments below!
Photo credits, in order of appearance: Reinante El Pintor de Fuego, Stig Nygaard, Starka-Snap, JohnONolan.
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A nice tutorial.
Although with Photoshop cs5 you might be able to add a step 7 and do a content aware fill around the images to fit the gap.
Have you tried any other programs? I found photoshop cs4 to be to unreliable to do anything with more than 10 photos. (Trying to do a mega pano.)
Here are 2 panos I took.
http://lh5.ggpht.com/_Ll9UDwzbROg/S_nWI_gYkxI/AAAAAAAAC5w/-0rzoHnEyow/s912/Snowy%20Scape%20Panorama.jpg
&
http://lh6.ggpht.com/_Ll9UDwzbROg/TERHHZr4xhI/AAAAAAAADRo/5seXDeA7_so/s912/Pigeon%20Forge%20Main%20Street%20Panorama.jpg
man the first one is really nice!
Great tutorial but can you make the final image a bit larger so we can see the image and not have to use a magnifier to see the details?
Hi Ivo, if you read the article there’s actually a link already there to a much bigger version of the final result.
Thanks for the comment
Great tut, time for me to challenge myself to a nice panoramic photo.
Silly question. But wouldn’t it be easier to process the photos color post photo merge? Thats what i do with little issues. the biggest issue is sometimes the size of the file and the ram needed to manage it all.
Hi Matt, you certainly could do it that way (I actually do both) – the only proviso would be that you made sure to do any photo-specific edits prior to the merge!
I made this a couple of weeks ago when I was in London:
Greenwich Park
Marble Arch
Horse Guards
If you like them, feel free to leave a comment
Tried to see the full size of the final image and it shows the small version.
Just thought you’d like to know.
maybe your browser is scaling it? I clicked the lin, and was able to see the full size. but had to click on the image for safari to show it full size.
http://phototuts.s3.amazonaws.com/335_panoramicimages/final-large.jpg
shows as being 2500 x 592
If you don’t have CS3, you can use a free program called Auto Stitch. The resolution is often lower (maybe that’s an option you can change), but it’s easy to use.
What about the “Panorama” mode in cameras like the Fujifilm Finepix S1800?
This is actually very easy to do but it’s the lens distortion effect that makes it 10 times better and the effects in photoshop for that are not so great (distort effects).. Any suggestions?
Photo Tuts, you are naughty!
I was reading “Step 2″ and reached to the explanatory “screenshot” of the step, which was actually an advertisement to TuneUp. And I sat there and watched the commercial (it was in a screenshot gif of the screen explaining the functionality of the program) trying to figure out what the hell John wants to say with that!
After I realized the “i” at the bottom and by then the commercial had finished…
It’s not nice to trick your readers like that! I understand that you need to make money, but I think you are making enough from the other 9-10 ads on the top, bottom and right of the content. There’s no need to mask them in the content now!
As for the tutorial, very well explained! Thumbs up to John!
Regards,
Alex Cican
Hey Alex, what a nifty bit of advertising! I’ve not seen that one yet – the positioning does sound a little counter intuitive, but I imagine there must have been some thought behind it! Really glad you enjoyed the tutorial though, thanks so much for commenting
I do this technique regularly, with my last panorama being created just over a week ago.
Sometimes the photo merge feature, whilst very good, often leaves slight join marks (slight discolouration etc when the different pictures meet). Not noticable to many, but a lot of perfectionists amongst us will be tempted to use layer masks and other brush techniques in photoshop to make the image look 100% seemless.
Great tip Sammo, thanks so much for taking the time to write it up!
One point to note is that when capturing your images your camera should be in Manual mode so that you use the same exposure settings throughout the images that will make up your panorama. Otherwise you can end up with bands/stripes in your panorama from some of the shots getting different exposures. Much easier to sort this out at the capture stage than the post processing stage…..Martin.
Fantastic tip Martin! I should have mentioned that!
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_6hKhe9cEHOE/SgAlS-QH66I/AAAAAAAACUI/RUwtXoddHgg/s1600-h/Tor-Panorama-klein.jpg
How do you keep it from perspective skewing and different light levels on different photographs? even though I kept everything manual.
I have captured a lot of panoramas of Alaska and on Kauai. You can see them on my main website and here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/24449738@N06/ . I have taught Photoshop for the last six years and one of the things I teach is how to put a panorama together. I have ran it to many hurdles creating my panos and always found the answers to make them come together.
I personally like using Reposition out of the Photomerge options. The reason I use it is because I want to use every single pixel possible in my panos. I do crop, but I have never cropped out that many pixels from any pano. This option may make you do a bit more work to create a pano, add your own masks per layer, brush in your layer blending in the masks, but you will never crop out as much as JohnONolan did in his example.
Peter states that he can not put together no more than 10 frames, which makes his PS CS4 unreliable. Peter, now I do not know how much RAM you have designated for PS to use and if you are a PC guy, I would highly recommend that you turn your RAM percentage, in Preferences, down to 55% or lower. This might solve your problem. Also, if anyone gets an error message when you ask PS to do an automatic action for you, like Photomerge, Merge to HDR, etc., turn your RAW percentage down and try it again. I bet it will work. The largest pano I have ever put together in PS was 45 vertical RAW files (a pano of Barrow, AK). I have also put together several two-story panos.
You did do a good job of explaining how to do a pano John. Keep up the good work!
Thanks so much for your detailed comment Jonathan! A really valuable insight to some more advanced options
http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2010/172/4/c/Doctor_Auto_Chain_Panarome_by_Azbayar.jpg
I love shooting panoramas, though I still have a ton that I haven’t put together yet, haha. Here’s one from the Grand Canyon, AZ, south rim overlook. http://j.mp/9HFuyK
I recommend Hugin (http://hugin.sourceforge.net/) as a better alternative to photoshop for this kind of work. It’s free and it has a lot more features such as lens distortion correction and automatic color adjustments between individual pictures, so you don’t have to do it manually. It takes more time and work to learn, but results tend to be better in the end.
Thaks a lot!
This is what I did with it:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasperheldenbergh/4871795702/
I’m getting a sony a230, and it doesn’t have live view. It’s going to be a pain (but worth it) to make panorama’s using this techniques!
really nice tutorial, do a little google search, you will got tons of panorama photo stitch softwares. I love acropano, its easy and fun. I not saying which is best, which is terrible. Photography should always choose what he need.
http://www.acropano.com