Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Panorama of the Kingdom

I wanted to share this photo with you because it is something I painstakingly spent hours creating it.  This is an eleven photo panorama of the top of a field filled with cows near our hunting camp.  I call it "Panorama of the Kingdom."


If you click on this photo you can view it MUCH larger!


Panorama's are just another facet of photography that I am beginning to experiment with.  That's what I love about photography... there is ALWAYS something new to discover and experiment with.  I don't think I could ever find an end to this hobby.  

How I made this panorama (in Photoshop).
  1. Facing away from the sun (for even exposure in the photos) I stood still and  panned my surroundings snapping photos at roughly the same level. 
  2. When snapping photos make sure you overlap a little in each photo.  This is key when it comes to piecing the images together.  You don't want any gaps in your scene!
  3. Load all your images into photoshop.
  4. Create a new, blank image (file-new) that is very large.  You'll want the dimensions to be about 2x higher than your individual photo size and as wide as your individual photo multiplied by the number of photos you have (for example... If you have 5 photos and each photo is 4000 pixels wide you'll create the new image 20,000 pixels wide)
  5. Copy and paste each individual photo onto your new blank image you just created.  It helps to sort of line them up when you paste them into the big image together.  You'll also notice when you past them into the big image that each piece of the panorama is an individual layer.  Hint - paste your images in left to right (or right to left) so that your layers will be numbered in the order as they appear. It makes lining things up and editing so much easier!
  6. Go through the painstaking process of lining up every individual photo.  You'll probably notice it is virtually impossible to make every aspect line up perfectly.  I usually use the horizon as my guide point.  The rest can be fixed later.
  7. If you notice an image in the panorama is darker/lighter than the others create a layer mask and adjust that layer individually.
  8. Crop the entire panorama so its nice and rectangular.  This is where if some photos are lower/higher than others you just even the edges out.  This panorama was at a diagonal looking down a hill, but I just cropped it at an angle to make it appear flat.
  9. For blending and lining up the parts that just don't match there is probably a better way to fix it than this, but what I did was carefully (and painstakingly) use the clone tool to blend the photos together.  
  10. Flatten the entire image -- right click on the background layer and select flatten.
  11. Edit the panorama just like any other photo now. 
  12. Don't forget... this photo will be HUGE.

Now doesn't that seem like quite a process?  I can't wait to try and tackle some more scenes that my camera can't seem to capture in just one single photo.  The possibilities are virtually endless.  Oh, and my husband is actually in this photo!  Did you spot him?


If you'd like to purchase the above panorama send an email to jenhannux(at)hotmail(dot)com
It is available in a large printed/mounted size.

6 comments:

  1. Nicely done Jen, great tutorial! It is so awesome to experiment and you do such a great job explaining how you do it!

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  2. Very cool! Thanks for the tutorial! Will it work in PS Elements?? I am assuming you are talking about the full blown Photoshop.

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  3. I actually do not have PS Elements and really have zero experience with it, but I imagine that you probably COULD do this since its pretty basic things you are doing... copy, paste, crop. Give it a whirl and let me know!

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  4. Why not use something like http://hugin.sourceforge.net/ ?

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  5. Because I have never heard of that before! You are awesome. Thank you! I always appreciate new things like that. I'm going to see if that shortens my twelve steps of editing.

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