Creating a panorama in Photoshop

Panorama of the Getty Villa in Malibu, PHOTOMERGED  from four individual shots.

We were driving north from LA last week and made a stop at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. What a lovely place! It is not a large museum, but the collection is of very high quality in a diversity of areas including ancient art, European and American painting, Asian art and Contemporary Art. For more about the Museum, read my review at Artpoints.net

Panorama of the entrance to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art

I took three digital photos of the Museum entrance and used Photoshop’s PHOTOMERGE function to create a panorama. If you have never done this, it is amazingly easy;

1. Take two or more digital photos of a landscape or architectural vista (I used three shots). No need for a tripod, Photoshop will correct for minor differences. Make sure that there is some overlap between each view.

2. Open the photos in Photoshop.

3. FILE>AUTOMATE>PHOTOMERGE

4. Browse or Add Open Files and click OK.
Photoshop will now create a panorama with a separate  layer and layer masks for each photo.

Before flattening the image, you can edit the layer masks as I did to remove a red car that drove into one of my shots.

original shot no car

original shot with unwanted car, before Photomerge

Merged panorama after editing the layer mask to hide the car

5. If you do not like what you got, go back and experiment with different settings.

6. If you want to do some stretching and correcting around the edges, you must first flatten the image into a single layer. Save a copy of your original if you think that you might want to do more editing.

Then…
EDIT>TRANSFORM>WARP

7. When you are happy with the result, use the Crop Tool to get rid of the ragged edges.

8. Your panorama is ready!

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