Panorama Tutorial

How to Make a Great Panorama

 

These are just my basic notes on panorama  making.  I will add a step-by-step set of instructions with images soon.

Shooting Panoramas

I quite enjoy panoramic shots.  I like the suspense of not knowing exactly what the end result will be.  Some don't work at all while others that I thought wouldn't work come out amazingly well.  Panoramas look expensive because in the past they could only be shot with a very expensive lens.  I often get comments like "You're very professional, you must have a very expensive lens!"  Fortunately, there's a work-a-round.  I shoot multiple exposures left-to-right overlapping them by about one third or so.  (By remembering to shoot left-to-right, processing the shots is easier since the images appear in the correct panoramic order in an image browser application like Adobe Bridge.)

Software

There are many other applications that will stitch panoramas together.  I use the inexpensive software Panorama Maker 5 by Arcsoft to stitch the images together automatically often with some manual tweaking.  Be sure to have plenty of RAM.  The more photos you're stitching, the more RAM you need.  I have 8 gigs.  After stitching, I adjust the image using Adobe Camera Raw and then Photoshop.  The warp tool in Photoshop is extremely useful.  Panoramas that are not quite symmetrical or missing a corner can be stretched appropriately using that tool.  

File Size

Also, because the shots are multiple exposure, the size of the finished image is impressive as well.  (Of course, the images on this blog are greatly reduced from their original size so they display quickly.)  My Canon 7D is an 18 megapixel camera which captures 5184 x 3456 pixels.  But if I'm taking a half dozen shots, subtract the overlays and the camera is acting as an image sensor that is approximately 4 times as large!  So even if I owned a really expensive fish-eye lens, I could not get such a large final image.  The number of pixels is not important for displaying the work on a display, but if the panorama is to be printed large scale, the large file size is really impressive.

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