Expand your world with Photomerge

When you’re looking through the camera viewfinder, take a moment and look to the left, to the right, and up and down. Often, trying to frame an expansive or interesting scene with a single exposure may not do the subject justice. In fact photographers have been using wide-format, panoramic cameras since the 19th century to capture large groups of people or to record impressive landscapes. With a digital camera you can expand your horizons and create spacious images simply by taking a number of overlapping images and then using the Photomerge function in Adobe® Photoshop® CS to, as the name implies, merge them together.

1. After shooting and downloading your source images you can access the Photomerge command by selecting File > Automate > Photomerge; but our preferred method is to highlight the targeted images in the File Browser and select Automate > Photomerge from the File Browser menu.

2. Photoshop will open previews of all the selected images into the Photomerge interface and do its best to overlap and merge the images into a panoramic scene (Figure 1).

   

   Figure 1: The Photomerge dialog.

3. If Photoshop has a problem or can’t find enough overlap, a warning message will pop up that saying the program couldn’t complete the task. But you can drag files into the Photomerge window from the image hopper at the top of the Photomerge interface and visually align files by rotating them with the rotate (R) and arrow (A) tools.

4. On the right you have a number of settings options for using Normal or Perspective. Normal will create a flat image as seen in Figure 2 and clicking on perspective make the closer sides larger, as seen in Figure 3.

   

   Figure 2: The Normal option produces flat panoramas.

   

   Figure 3: The Perspective option creates a slight warp, making the sides that appear closer to you a bit larger.

5. We recommend keeping Snap to Image checked, and also Advanced Blending, which uses a sophisticated color-matching process to blend the images that can’t be duplicated with layer masks. Snap to Image is helpful when you have to manually align pieces. Although it may sound counterintuitive, leave the Keep as Layers box unchecked, as this will defeat the advanced color-matching blending that is built into Photomerge.

One last hint: your panoramic images do not have to be rectangular, as seen in Figure 4, or even panoramic in subject, as seen in Figure 5. Photomerge is a great way to blend and create realistic panoramas, as well as abstract and surprising images.

Figure 4: There is no law that states that panoramas need to be rectangular…

Figure 5: …or even of a panoramic subject, for that matter.

Think outside the rectangle and have some fun!

Excerpted from “Real World Digital Photography, 2nd Edition;” copyright © 2004 by Katrin Eismann, Sean Duggan, and Tim Grey. Published by Peachpit Press. Used with the permission of Pearson Education and Peachpit Press. To buy this book, visit www.peachpit.com.