Computer Tips From A Computer Guy

How to merge pictures to create a panoramic image

Posted: 04 Jul 2009 03:17 AM PDT

You have a bunch of fantastic scenery pictures that you have taken and you know that if you could stich the pictures side by side, you could create a great panoramic image, right? But how to go about it?

Traditionally we would have just pasted the images side by side and prayed that the scale and angles will work out – but usually they don't and it is hard to manually do this. Adobe decided to automate the process of stitching photos together to make a single panoramic image.

In this post I will go through the steps you can follow to create your own panoramic images. If you don’t want to do it yourself, read my previous post on using free software to create panoramas.

If you have a series of photos taken with approximately 40% overlapping details you can automatically merge them using Photoshop. Assuming you did not zoom in and out your lenses while taking the pictures, the details of the pictures are OK for automerge.

In Photoshop, click File menu > Automate > Photomerge:

Under the Photomerge window, browse for the files that you want to merge then check the boxes at the lower part of the window. Choose a type of layout (my favorite is Spherical) then click OK.

The original files are a series of shots that I took from left to right.

In Photoshop the output looks like the one below. It is sometimes jagged on the edges, but you can easily crop the edges to get rid of the non-matching sections.

You can crop the edges out using the crop tool:

The drawback is that you would loose the details on the cropped out section of the images. If you are not satisfied with the outcome next time try to take the pictures from a greater distance.

The final output will look like the one below.