How to make GREAT panoramas
Huge panoramas all around!
Panoramas are just an image which combines multiple images into one. You may have noticed the options to do these on your phone for some time. iPhone and others have had the capabilities for years but the results you get do leave some room for improvement. For a quick and dirty panorama of a landscape to just show friends and family then phone panoramas can be brilliant but if you’re serious you’ll break out the DSLR and Photoshop. A lot more work I know but it’s worth it for the results.
If you would like to check out the video version of this article click here.
Pre-Photoshop Work
Before you even load the images into Photoshop and do any work relating to making a Panorama. You need to make sure, you take the images correctly, to begin with. For this to work, you need to make sure each image has about 30%-45% overlap from the last image. This is purely to help Photoshop line up the photos when it creates your panorama. Secondly, if you want to make sure the images come out perfect then be sure to use a tripod so all photos are taken on the exact same plane of elevation. Photoshop can handle slight differences but you might end up with some hill like horizons like I did.
Also, if you want to be fancy then you can go ahead and do some retouching and editing work on your photos. I recommend using Adobe Lightroom to do this as it is non-destructive but that is outside of the scope of this article. So, make sure to let me know if you would like to see an article regarding how to use Lightroom to retouch and edit photos.
Anyway, now you have your photos with the overlap. It is now time to move onto creating your panorama.
Making the Panorama
Making a panorama inside of Photoshop is easy. Gather all your images together into one folder. I placed mine on the desktop for easy access. After this, start-up Photoshop, in my case it’s Photoshop CC but if yours has the photo merge option you will be fine. Next, click on the photo merge option which can be found: File > Automate > Photo merge.
After this, click on browse and then locate all your images; once done, Photoshop will import all of them. Out of the options than the only two I enable are: Blend images together and Content aware fill transparent areas. These two options will essentially allow Photoshop to fill in any areas that the images missed to create a complete image. Once, this is all done, click on ‘Ok’ and let Photoshop do its thing.
Once, completed you have your brand-new panorama which you can print, share or just keep for yourself. A word of warning, if you took the images with your DSLR then the final panorama’s file size will be huge!
Conclusion
That is everything on how to create a great panorama using a DSLR and Adobe Photoshop. However, if panoramas aren’t for you and instead you want to draw attention to a single aspect of your photo, come check out how to do selective colour photography here or the video here. If you have any questions or problems with anything at all then be sure to contact me either on Twitter, in the comments or by email. If you would like to see more of photos then check out my portfolio or my Instagram. If videos are more your thing then check out my YouTube channel here. And, until next time.
Thanks for reading.
