Photography
Stitch images to create breathtaking panoramas.
Learn how to stitch several photos together for an ultra-wide panorama.
Create spectacular panoramas.
With Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, you can take a series of connected photos and then easily stitch them together to recreate even the widest landscape or city view. Here’s how:
- Set your camera to manual focus and aperture priority
- Shoot from left to right, overlapping about a third of the image each time
- Use panorama tools like tilt-shift lenses, wide-angle lenses, and a tripod
- Stitch the shots together in Lightroom
Stitch photos together to create a bigger picture.
Sometimes even the widest lens isn’t enough to capture a stunning view. But you can recapture that vista with multiple photos thanks to digital photo editing, which makes combining images easy. With Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, you can merge several landscape shots into a widescreen panorama. And stitching images together digitally actually improves the overall resolution of your final product.
Lightroom gives you one of the widest feature sets available in panorama stitching software, but even with the best technology you still need the proper technique. Whether your goal is outdoor photography or capturing a cityscape, make sure you have the right tools and know-how for the job.
Get the right shots for a panorama stitcher.
Modern digital camer as do a lot of automatic white-balancing, aperture adjustment, focus adjustment, and shutter speed changes when you take a photo. While this can be a helpful feature, if you snap a bunch of photos to stitch together you can end up with an in consistent image due to differing exposures in each shot.
“Set your camera to manual focus and use aperture priority,” professional architectural photographer Barry Grossman says. “This way, your series of images will stitch much more effectively, with less variances that may degrade the final product.”
Take panorama photos from left toright. Overlap about a third of each image between the shots, just to play it safe. This gives you some extra room to work with when you’re editing your photos.
Prep for the shoot with panorama tools.
It’s easier to create panoramas with the right equipment. Learn how these tools help even the best photo editing software make higher quality panoramas.
Tilt-shift photography is when you use camera movements that change the orientation or position of the lens with respect to the film or image sensor on the camera. Tilt-shift lenses allow you to change the orientation, perspective, and position of the lens without moving the camera back itself. These lenses allow you to rotate the lens plane relative to the image plane (tilt) and help you move the lens parallel to the image plane (shift).
In many outdoor and panoramic settings (when you shoot trees or buildings, for example), normal lens positioning might cause the lines of an object to have a distorted perspective. Tilt-shift allows you to set a camera in position to create natural perspective and then move the lens in such a way as to capture scale and height.
Tilt-shift lenses can be tricky, but they allow for minimal distortion and easier image stitching than you get with wide-angle lenses. But they’re no substitute for setting up your camera in a good spot: “The more your height of the camera is relative to the size of the structure,” says Grossman, “the less tilt you’re going to have and the easier your stitching is going to be and the more scaled the building will feel.”
Wide-angle lenses
Wide-angle lenses (in their extreme form, the fisheye lens) offer a wider and more spherical field of view, often at the cost of distortion around the edges. Many photographers and cinematographers use this distortion to great effect (think Lawrence of Arabia’s sweeping vistas). Deciding which one to use is part of the creative process. Lightroom can also be helpful in reducing distortion.
Tripods
While you can make a lot of spectacular corrections with your photo editing software, the best practice is always going to be to take along a tripod. For panorama shots, especially, the stabilization you get from mounting a camera on a tripod will help keep your images level. That, in turn, will make the photos easier to stitch together.
Use Lightroom for the perfect stitch.
- Select the images to combine into the panorama.
- Navigate to Photo › Photo Merge › Panorama Merge.
- In the dialog box, drag the Boundary Warp slider to distort the image enough to remove empty areas outside the images, or click the Auto Crop button.
- Select the Merge button to create the panorama.
Once complete, the resulting image will appear in your library. From there, you can export it as a JPG, TIFF, or PNG, or choose from many other formats.
Continue to hone your panorama photo skills and learn to merge photos in Lightroom. With the right shots and the right technology, you can master stitching together the photos that will create beautiful vistas.
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