How to join Photos to make a Panorama November 7, 2004
Posted by Andy Roberts in : hi res photos, learning, Art , trackbackComposite Panoramic Photographs
In this article I am going to share what I have learned about putting digital photographs together to make a wide angle panoramic picture. All you need is a digital camera and some picture editing software. I used PaintShopPro but you could use Adobe Photoshop, The Gimp, Macromedia Fireworks or lots of others. Suggestions for Mac users are welcome.
When you are enjoying the great outdoors, it can easily happen that you see a wonderful view which makes you stop and look at it. You gaze around to take it all in, and then reach for a camera only to discover that the landscape vista is simply to wide to fit in the viewfinder. If you have video functionality you might consider slowly panning around, trying to keep the horizon level, but you would need a really good tripod to do this smoothly, and it may not be so good to watch anyway. In the days of film cameras, people might take several shots from different angles and then after they’ve got the snaps back from the labs, mount them together onto a backing page, overlapping as best they can. It didn’t look that good though. And it isn’t quite as easy as I first imagined to do it digitally either.
My first attempt involved standing underneath the bow of the Cutty Sark in Greenwich, to try and capture the whole shape of the ship and hull without getting railings, steps and people in the way.
I was careful to keep the bow line centred and made sure I had plenty of overlap from one shot to the next. When home, I uploaded the digital photos onto my computer thinking it would be fun to slap them together and make a whole ship.
I discovered two serious problems.
1) The lighting levels were different for each shot, so the colours don’t blend together at the edges.
2) I couldn’t make the shapes match up from one picture to the next.
What was going on?
1) Mostly due to the automatic exposure setting adjusting itself between shots. You might get better results using a fixed manual setting but I suspect there would still be differences, and you might get one or more photos over or under exposed so that they are unusable, spoiling the set.
My answer is to adjust the brightness and contrast digitally, to make as close a match as possible by eye. This may involve making several slight adjustments over varying patches selected with a lassoo or marquee select tool.
2) I think this is something to do with the crafting of the lens causing a curved perspective from the centre to the edge of each photograph. It’s a bit weird, the horizon may look horizontal but it isn’t.
Anyway, my answer is NOT to try and map the edge of one photo onto the corresponding place in the overlap section of the adjacent one, but to trim an equal amount of overlap from both sides before making the join. This may be easier to explain with a diagram.
Work with the highest resolution uncompressed digital photos, even if it slows your computer down at times, using the zoom out tool to see the overall picture. Create a new canvas big enough to take the composite picture. Then copy and paste as a new selection each of the cropped and light-adjusted photos, using the cursor keys not the mouse, to make fine positioning adjustments.
Then zoom in close and use the clone tool, ink dropper and pen to touch up any obvious problems with the overlaps. If necessary, do it pixel by pixel in some places.
So here is a panoramic photograph made in this way, it’s a photo taken from a headland looking back at Leketio, another fishing port in Basque country, Spain. The only trouble is you’ll need a really wide computer screen to see it properly!
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
My digital camera was provided to me with a software that does that automatically. It’s called Panorama Maker http://www.arcsoft.com/en/products/panoramamaker/
Oh very good. Do you have any examples you produced with this software? Well, perhaps I learned something by doing it manually, and trying to explain.
Just found out the camera at school does this manually.I’ll have a go with our view at lunchtime. These instruction are very useful anyway as my own camera doesn’t do this. I’ll furl this when I get home
L
Thanks Andy-good advice-I’ve never tried it but have come across the situation you describe a lot-I’ll try it next time! Igor talks about this village a lot and how pretty it is….
Here we are again… Sorry Andy! Hey, you know that the grassfield we can see on the right of your photo is called locally “hamburger” or something like that?; I don’t know why, once a local told me so. Underneath is Karraspio beach, famous in the Basque Country as the “Lekeitio’s beach” but actually belongs to Mendexa, the small village above Lekeitio (there is a song in euskera but with English title called “Welcome to Lekeitio’s Beach”… the Basques are becoming cosmopolit!!). In the centre is the famous Lekeitio’s isle and on the background the town itself. The hill at the very end is called Otoio. And on the left we see a road; it’s the road heading to the next town on the coastline, Ondarroa. Between Lekeitio and Ondarroa are 13 kms and 115 curves!!!! (cientifically counted and checked througout history by locals from both towns). And among these curves there are some amazing, hidden rocks where you can have quasi-paradisiacal swimms, with few or not people at all, cristal water and fresh air… and you can be all the day naked, if you want, as many locals do. Summer is better, of course. I can tell. Sorry Andy, as you can see I am not interested at all in the technical part of the photo but in what we can see there, instead. If you are frustrated with my long note a kiwi girl is the one to blame, she recomended me to visit you blog. Carry on, it’s great!!
Interesting. I am a graphic designer and adult education teacher, I teach Photoshop amongst others.
For panoramas I generally find it necessary to use Free Transform to adjust the fit of the modules as lens distortion screws up the size of the detail, even if you take the camera off of wide angle for the shots.
It is possible, using gradient masks on adjustment layers to blend the light on the shots to give a natural transient to the light across the panorama – it should change across the horizon.
Rather than sharp cuts and exact pixel matching I employ feathered edges to create a blend over the joins and, if there is detail presented better on one shot than another, use a soft edged eraser to “make a hole” to show the better detail.
Maintaining layers in sets keeps all your options open until you are sure you have the best you can out of the images.
Hope some of that is some use … keep them pixels coming …