Panoramas are a simple and practical way for combing multiple photographs into one with the result that you get a good overall overview of a landscape or cityscape.
Often people are struggling with mediocre in-camera panorama modes or very complicated image merging techniques in Adobe Photoshop when trying to create panomaras.
Photoshop-expert Howard Pinksy explains an easy way how to create great panoramas using Photoshop and Lightroom in under a minute:
1. First, import your images into Adobe Lightroom, select the photos you want to create a panorama with and merge them to a panorama by right-clicking on them, choosing ‚Edit in…’ and then selecting the option ‚Merge to panorama in Photoshop’.
2. Photoshop is now going to merge all of your shots into one, probably leaving some parts of your final image transparent. You can fix that by merging all of your layers into one and then turning the single layer into a selection by clicking on the thumbnail of the image in the layer dialogue holding CTRL/CMD.
3. After that, choose ‚Modify Contract’ in the Select-menu and contract your selection by about 15px. Now inverse the selection.
4. Then, enter the fill-dialogue-box using ‚Shift+Delete’, select ‚Content Aware’ and press OK.
5. Optionally, if your image is distorted by having used a wide angle-lens, you can straighten out your panorama by using the adaptive wide angle tool and crop off some of the edges of the image, where you can sometimes find remaining transparency.
After all of that, you can simply save your file back into Lightroom and continue editing there.
It is as simple as it sounds. Let me know in the comments below whether this technique worked out for you and if you got any further advice for people that want to create great panoramas.
“Photoshop AND Lightroom”, the headline didn’t say. Is there an alternate set of steps for those who only have Photoshop? (Also, Microsoft has a free program called “ICE” that does pretty good auto-stitching for my money.)
In Photoshop CC is File -> Automate -> Photomerge. You’ll see a dialog that allows you to select multiple images and merge them into a panorama.
Thanks!
Wow, I like how he use content-aware fill. It is simple but generates good results.
I don’t have Photoshop so this might be off-topic (I’m on Ubuntu), but Hugin has been my favorite pano tool for years. With the latest version, I can get a pano from 20+ images with literally 5 clicks, yet it has a lot of easy options to tweak (perspective, straighten, crop, HDR,…).
It doesn’t have content-aware fill, but I rarely want to do that, and that’s pretty easy in GIMP anyway.