Creating panorama images
Tucked away inside of Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Adobe Photoshop Elements is a great tool for creating spectacular panoramas with just a few clicks — it's called Photomerge. Think of a panorama as a super-landscape or a really wide-angle photograph of some subject. To find out more about landscape photography, check out our tutorial. It used to be that creating a panorama required a very expensive camera, but now Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Adobe Photoshop Elements let you stitch together multiple photographs into one super-wide picture with ease.

Get your images
In order to create a good panorama, you'll need a series of images that overlap. The best way to create these pictures is by using a tripod, because you'll want to keep your camera level and steady. If you don't have a tripod though, don't worry. Photoshop's tool still does a good job as long as you overlap enough of each consecutive image to give it enough area to match up.

To get started, find a good scenic spot and attach your camera to your tripod. Before you start taking pictures, it's good to plan out your shot. Point the camera all the way to the left side of your scene, look through the viewfinder, and notice where the right most edge of the image is. Pick some object on the right side of the frame that you'll remember, and take your picture. Then move the camera to the right until the object that was on the right edge is now on the left edge. Take your next picture, doing the same thing. Keep repeating this process until you've captured the entire scene, from left to right. And don't forget to keep your camera level, only moving it side to side, not up and down.

When you've got your series of images, it's time to fire up Photoshop CS3 (or Photoshop Elements) and make your panorama.

Choose your files
For this tutorial, we're going to use Adobe Photoshop CS3, but if you're using Adobe Photoshop Elements, you can follow right along. (The only difference is that you'll want to start the process by selecting Create Photomerge from the File menu.)

To begin making your panorama, go to the File menu and chose Photomerge from the Automate choice. Next, you'll see the Photomerge dialog box. You can choose to either use files or open files. (In Elements, you can only choose files.) Use the Browse button to find the images you want to use in your panorama.

For most panoramas, you can click the "Attempt to Automatically Arrange Source Images" checkbox. This will tell Photoshop to look at the pictures and try to figure out how to line them up. Photoshop usually does a great job at this (and you can skip right to the Touch It Up section below), but sometimes Photomerge works better if you manually line up the photographs. For this tutorial, we'll do it by hand and turn off that checkbox.

Lining it up
Photomerge's working area is pretty simple. Along the top are thumbnails for the pictures you'll be working with. The big, blank, white space is the area you'll use to arrange your pictures.

Drag the left-most picture down into the white space in the middle of the screen. This will be your starting point (though you could also start with the other side or the middle, if you'd like), and use this picture to line up your panorama.

Making pictures line up is easier if you zoom in, so chose the Magnifying Glass Tool from the tool palette on the left side and then click it a few times to zoom in all the way.

Next comes the fun part! Drag your next picture down from the top of the window and move it so that it overlaps with the first picture. You'll want to pick a prominent object in the foreground or background to help you line things up. Don't worry if everything doesn't completely line up immediately; Photoshop will merge the pictures together for you. It's often good to pick a tree or some other vertical object in the foreground to use.

Just keep repeating this process until you've got all of your pictures lined up, and you're almost done. Before you click OK though, check the box that says Advanced Blending. This will allow Photoshop to apply a few special techniques to blend together all the images in the panorama.

Click the OK button and Photoshop will automatically merge all of your photographs into one large panorama. You'll probably notice that there are some spaces where some of the pictures are higher than others, leaving a bit of a gap at the top or bottom.



This happens because you're merging photographs that haven't been lined up perfectly. Don't worry, just choose the crop tool, draw a box around the part of the picture without gaps, and then hit the "Enter" or "Return" key on your keyboard to crop your image.

Touch it up
Usually the panorama looks great and no tweaking is needed, but sometimes large areas of color will merge with a small line between the shades. This is a result of combining photographs where the colors aren't exactly the same. You can fix some of these problems using the Patch Tool and the Healing Brush Tool.

And that's it. You've just gone from several individual pictures to one giant panorama with just a few clicks and drags. Explore your surroundings and look for things that would make great panoramas, snap a few shots, and let Photoshop do the rest.