Great panoramic images don’t require a twenty thousand dollar camera and a team of experts. You can stitch together any series of images from any camera (even your phone!) with some planning. And Photoshop. And preferably a tripod.
Here’s a step-by-step outline of my process for creating high resolution panoramics.
Step 1 – Find a great scene. This pano consists of 10 shots taken in Arches National Park in Utah.
Step 2 – Set your camera to manual exposure and manual focus. You don’t want the meter of your camera changing exposure on you as you take your shots. You also don’t want to risk autofocus changing focus on you.
Step 3 – Use a tripod if at all possible. You will get an extra level of quality if you can stabilize your camera for all of your exposures.
Step 4 – Try to overlap your shots by about 20 to 30 percent. Again, easier if you use a tripod. In the sample shot below the darker block in the middle is the overlap (maybe a bit too much overlap in this case but better too much overlap than not enough).
Step 5 – In order to best utilize all the pixels offered by my Canon 5D Mark III, I shot verticals. I could have shot fewer frames in landscape but I’m looking for maximum quality here. I shot 10 frames total in this series. (See screenshot in step 7.)
Step 6 – I don’t make it to Utah every day so I shot several series just in case. Unfortunately that means more images to store, process and sort. I suggest you shoot in a pattern (I always shoot left to right) and you mark a new series by holding your hand in front of the camera and grabbing a shot as a separator.
Step 7 – Once downloaded to your computer it’s time to find the hero shots. In Adobe Bridge I find the start of a series, then, using the first file’s name, I add the word “stitch” to the entire series. In the screenshot below the first shot in the series is named “conway-20121029-0240,” so I select it and the additional 9 images and add a keyword “stitch-20121029-0240″ to all of them. This is going to make it much easier to find the files that belong together at a later date.
Step 8 – I make a test pano from a series of small images first to make sure I like the series. In Adobe Bridge I select a series of images and use “Export to Hard Drive” to quickly sample down the series to 1000 pixels on the long edge. Large enough that I can judge quality but small enough that I have a sample pano in just a couple minutes. I also settle on modes and settings while working with the smaller images (see dialog box in screenshot below). If I like the sample, I select the full size original images in Adobe Bridge, go to Tools > Photoshop > Photomerge, enter whatever settings worked well for my sample, and I let my laptop chug away for 15 to 20 minutes. I always try auto first and I’m usually happy with it about 95 percent of the time – Photoshop has really good judgement.
As people are (finally) upgrading to Creative Suite 4, I thought it prudent to recap some of the more important tips.
You probably already know that when you find the file you are interested in, in Adobe Bridge, you can double click on that file and it opens in the program that made it. And that’s great. But what if you want to place a PSD file into InDesign or Flash (or After Effects or Illustrator)? The fast, convenient way is to do the following: select the item or items you want to place into another Adobe program, go to the File menu, go Down to “Place” and choose the program you want the files to goto. Voila!
You have always been able to add keywords to images in Adobe Bridge but new in CS3 is the ability to apply sub-keywords and their parents in one simple click, assuming you have made a series of keywords that are related. I created an “animal” keyword that applies to all animals, a “dog” sub-keyword for dogs and a “Labrador Retriever” sub-keyword for just that breed of dog. If I click on just “Labrador Retriever” I apply only the keyword “Labrador Retriever”
But why wouldn’t I want to apply the parent keywords of “animal” and “dog” to this image also? I can do so with 1 click, not 3. If I shift-click on “Labrador Retriever” it adds that keyword and all its parents which is very frequently what I want
