Creating Panorama Images in Photoshop CS3
I've always liked the idea of creating panorama photographs. About 10 years ago, I bought a small travel (film) camera that had a "panorama" feature that essentially was a switch that you would slide to one side or the other and when you looked through the viewfinder, voila! You had a pano shot. Well, not really, two pieces of black plastic just came in and cropped your viewfinder and then the developer at the foto-mat would just cut the film differently as it rolled down through the processor.
Well, things have changed significantly in the past 10 years and we no longer need to resort to trying to fake a pano shot. While there are a wide variety of hardware-based accessories you can buy including specialized ball heads and slide rails for a tripod setup there are also some great software solutions as well including two new and improved ways to stitch together photos to create a panorama from within Photoshop CS3.
The Photomerge (found under File > Automate > Photomerge) feature was a great addition in Photoshop CS2 (I think it first came in CS2) but the problem I had (at least with my photos) was that I could never get it to blend the sky very well even with the Advanced Blending options. It was a dead give away that it had been stitched (poorly) together. The new Photomerge in CS3 now does a tremendous job of blending images together even if they had different exposure, shutter or aperture settings (which is what usually throws it off in the first place).
There's also another way to do this (isn't there always ANOTHER way to do something in Photoshop?) without using Photomerge. You can use the Auto-Align Layers and Auto-Blend Layers features in Photoshop CS3 and get great results (probably identical but I'll get to that in a moment).
You can download my demo file if you want to follow along (Manhattan-COMBO.psd.zip - 2.7 MB). This file has 5 layers that we'll align together using the Edit > Auto Align Layers feature. You can separate them out later if you want to use the Photomerge method. Here we go...
Step 1: Open the demo file and select all of the layers in the Layers palette by selecting the layer on the top and then hold the Shift key and then click on the layer on the bottom of the stack.
Step 2: In Photoshop CS3, go to the Edit Menu and choose Auto-Align Layers...
In the next dialog box, the default is set to Auto. You can try it but I've already played with this image and to me, I think the Cylindrical option works the best on this sample photo. Your mileage may vary depending on your photos including the lens you used, the subject matter, the distance and angle you were compared to the subject matter etc).
Click OK and Photoshop CS3 will do it's Auto-Align magic. The result will be something that looks like this.
Notice that you'll need to blend the image so the sky doesn't have those bad overlaps and the individual layers look like this in the layers palette:
Step 4: Make sure you have all of the layers selected and then choose Edit > Auto-Blend Layers.
There are no options here so just choose it and be prepared to be amazed at what Photoshop CS3 does. The engineers on this performed some pretty cool math. When it's all done, first, look at your image. Chances are, it looks great and the cool thing is that you didn't have to create any layer masks or do anything tricky to make it happen. However, Photoshop CS3 (and their engineers) did! Take a look at the layers palette and the layer masks it created. I'm stunned every time I see this on a different pano I create.
I created the pano using Photomerge and got an almost identical image. The layer masks were different because of the order in which Photomerge stacked the layers, but the end result was nearly, if not identical to the method above. So depending on which way you prefer, you have choices on how you want to make your pano.
Finally, I cropped my image and then added an effect or two to give the buildings a glow and then a Curves adjustment layer with a layer mask to darken the clouds a bit to make them a little more dramatic.
Click on the photo above to see a larger version.
Again, try this method as well as the Photomerge method. Photomerge is more automated and doesn't require you to have all of the desired images as their own layer in a single document to start (though it ends up doing that). The method outlined above is fun to do because you get to see it all come together easier. So maybe after you learn and see what's happening you can go for the faster more automated method. Either way, I hope you enjoy the new/improved feature in Photoshop CS3 and create some cool panoramas!