Panoramas – How to make them?

 

We’ve all seen panoramic views, maybe on a restaurant wall on in your dentist.

Many modern digital cameras have built in panoramic tools built, helping you capture what you see. These tools are great but some are restricted. Some camera’s internal processors crop the pictures they create, you end up with the picture you wanted in many cases but when you download it to your pc it may be no bigger in pixel length than a normal picture from your camera.

In order to make a great panorama, you will need to take a series of pictures. Using the camera in the portrait position enables you to created larger / taller pictures with more detail. When taking each shot, be sure to overlap the previous shot. This will enable either program to join the pictures easier more effectively.

 

There are some great applications out there to help you make full sized great quality panoramic and upsized pictures. We will cover two, one a each end of the money spectrum.

Microsoft’s Live Photo Gallery
Adobe’s Photoshop CS5

 

Live Photo Gallery is Microsoft’s free photo management / social sharing application. It offers some basic photo and video manipulation tools but has a great panoramic engine. Photoshop CS5 is Adobe’s latest offering of its world famous full fat graphics editing program. CS5 is packed with some powerful tools including an easy to use but extremely accurate panoramic engine.

 

I took this picture of Exmouth beach in March 2010. Its made up of 6 shots resulting in a picture 24207 x 13547 pixels per inch.

I will use the pictures used to create this panorama to walk through how to create it in both Live Photo and Photoshop.

 

We will walk through Live Photo first.

Once you have loaded the Live Photo application, select the pictures you wish to join in the panorama, seen in LP_PN_1. Then click ‘Make’ and ‘Create Panoramic Photo’.

Live Photo will then do pretty much everything else for you. Once the panorama is created, Live Photo will ask you to save the picture. I would recommend saving the file as a TIFF. This will save an un-compressed full size and quality version of the panorama. You can choose to save the file as a JPEG but you may find image quality is reduced.

Once the panorama has saved you may wonder what has happened, there will be a curvy black border all the way around the picture, see LP_PN_5. This is the area that Live Photo could not join. In Live Photo, there are no advanced tools that will let you clone this area.

Click ‘Fix’ on to the bar of the window and the click on the ‘Crop’ tool, LP_PN_6. Crop the best area of the picture being sure not to catch any of the black area’s, LP_PN_7 and then click ‘Apply’

Your final picture will be saved automatically.

LP_PN_1	LP_PN_2
LP_PN_3	LP_PN_4
LP_PN_5	LP_PN_6
LP_PN_7	LP_PN_8

 

To create the panorama in Photoshop, there is a similar process.

Take a look through the picture walkthrough below. Once Photoshop has loaded, click ‘File’ and move to ‘Automate’ then ‘Photomerge’. A new window will load (PS_PN_"2), click browse and select the pictures you wish to merge. On the left hand side of the window there are some output options. I mainly use ‘Cylindrical’ as I find it gives the best results. I would recommend having a play and working out which one suites your needs most.

Once your happy with the files selected and the output option click ‘OK’, Photoshop will then work its way through, build the panorama, join and mask the joins. Once complete you will be left with a similar output file to Live Photo as seen in PS_PN_5. You could choose to crop the picture like in Live Photo or you could use the content aware fill function within CS5.

To use content aware, you will need to flatten the layers, click the grey down arrow above the opacity selection on the layers pallet. Click ‘Flatten Layers’. Once this is done, select the magic wand tool and select an area of white that is bordering the panorama (PS_PN_7). After selecting, hit the delete key and select ‘Content Aware Fill’ from the drop down menu, click ok. Photoshop will fill the selected areas using a very clever algorithm. You may have to clone out some join marks but it does not take very long.

Once you have filled all white area’s and cloned out any joins you will be left with a stunning panorama.

Depending on your system specs, you may have to select small areas at a time when using content aware. It is a very memory hungry tool.

 

PS_PN_1	PS_PN_2
PS_PN_3	PS_PN_4
PS_PN_5	PS_PN_6
PS_PN_7	PS_PN_8
PS_PN_9

 

Please contact me with any questions and feel free to post your panoramas in the comments section.