Creating Panoramas with Photomerge
If you want to capture the grandeur of a sweeping horizon or an iconic
structure, nothing quite does it like a panorama, which allows you
to combine multiple frames into one single powerful image. From
the earliest days of photography, artists were assembling individual
photos to create a wider view than their lenses could capture in a
single shot. In the digital age, where you can shoot until you run
out of memory card space and then allow a tool like Photoshop to
do the blending and merging, creating panoramas has become al-
most miraculously easy.
Photomerge, the command in Photoshop that automatically com-
bines images to form panoramas, invokes a combination of the
Auto-Align Layers command and its companion, Auto-Blend Lay-
ers, the latter of which automatically adjusts and masks images so
they merge seamlessly. Amazingly, just by applying Auto-Align
Layers and Auto-Blend Layers in sequence, Photomerge is able to
create panoramas of astonishing quality. We’ll perform such a feat
in this exercise.- Select the photos in the Bridge. Even though Pho-
tomerge is a Photoshop function, it is most efficiently
invoked from the Bridge so that you can choose your
images with the aid of thumbnails. If you’re still in the Bridge
from the last exercise, great. If not, from Photoshop, click the
icon on the right side of the options bar to switch to the Bridge.
Then navigate to the Panorama subfolder in the Lesson 09 folder
inside Lesson Files-PsCS5 1on1.
Click Theatre Ancient_01.jpg and then Shift-click Theatre
Ancient_14.jpg to select a series of images (represented in
Figure 9-27) that I took at the best-preserved Roman theater in
the world, the Theatre Ancient d’Orange in Southern France.
Given my love of both Roman antiquities and the I, Claudius
PBS miniseries, I wanted to capture the overwhelming feeling
of being in the midst of such an amazing structure in a way
that a single shot from too far away never would have captured.
PeaRl Of WISDOm
Although I did not use a tripod, I took care to shoot every image from a
single vantage point by pivoting my head and camera, keeping my feet and
hips fixed. This is the key to shooting a successful Photomerge composition:
Rotate left and right, tilt up and down, but keep your point of perspective
fixed. Overlap the individual shots by about 30 percent or more to ensure
Figure 9-27. complete information.322 Lesson 9: Pro Photography Tools