What happens when you want to make a panoramic image but using a camera’s “panorama” mode won’t help? You take several shots and stitch them together in Photoshop or your image editing software of choice.
For example, I wanted to make a panoramic image of my four cats, but getting them all to do what I wanted, at the same time, and hold their poses long enough, was impossible. Therefore, I had to photograph each of them individually and stitch the four images together in Photoshop. This really isn’t as daunting as it may seem. You just have to make sure your in-camera settings (like aperture, shutter speed, and focal length) are the same or as close to the same as possible for each image. Using your camera’s manual setting is the best way to go. Then, you just create a canvas in Photoshop with the same resolution as your original images and enough space (height and width) to accommodate all your images. Copy and paste your original images into this new canvas and make any adjustments necessary to get them to line up. I had to overlap a few edges to get things to work right as well as adjust the levels of an image or two. Once your images are lined up, you can use either the clone stamp tool or the healing brush to get rid of any glaringly obvious seams, crop if needed, and make any adjustments to levels, brightness, and contrast that you want.
And voila! You’re a photo seamstress!!
Here’s the end result of my project. Four images manually stitched into one panorama.
Until next time…
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~A.M.
Audrey May Photography 