How to Create a Panorama in Photoshop – The Easy Way

Create a Panorama in Photoshop

Today I’m going to show you how to stitch together a panorama in Photoshop. I’m going to start off with some photography tips. So when you go out to photograph your panorama, you’ll come back with a lot better images. Then we’ll show you how to stitch images together in Photoshop with JPEG images and then raw images. Let’s start off with some helpful photography tips.

Photography Tips for Shooting a Panorama

Use a sturdy tripod. You can do a panorama with a handheld camera, but it might not turn out as good as you might think. It’s good to level your tripod. Also, you have tripods these days that have levelers that you can check to make sure your tripod is level and that’s just another factor that will help you when you bring in your images into Photoshop.

Next, you’re going to want to take multiple shots. If you’re shooting landscapes or you’re just used to using a wide lens, in this case for your panorama, you may want to use, say, a 50 millimeter or higher. This will eliminate some distortion and make it easier to bring into Photoshop. Next, you want to shoot in apertures to keep everything focused, say, like F8.

You might want to stay away from shooting in, say, F2. So you want everything in focus. You want all the images in your panorama to be sharp. So one way to do this is to use manual focus so on your camera, set your focus and then change your focus mode to manual so that while you’re moving your camera focus does not change.

The next thing you want to do is try experimenting with shooting vertical and horizontal. Of course, you know vertical. You have more images. This might be a good option. Shoot vertically. You have more images, but that just might give Photoshop a better opportunity to stitch all these images together. So try shooting vertical. Now let’s bring in our images into Photoshop so if we come up here, do file automate photo merge.

How to make a Panorama using JPG images

So here we have all these options here. For different ways that Photoshop is going to deal with your photos. Auto is going to probably work the best. Also down here, blend images together should be checked. You probably won’t have to deal with these other ones. The vignette removal or geometric distortion correction. Because if you don’t use like a fisheye lens or a wide lens, you should be okay and content-aware filled transparent areas.

These transparent areas. This is talking about is usually an area right around the edges of the photo that you’re probably going to want to take care of yourself. So I’m going to browse for a folder that is on my desktop. And so I’m going to bring in eight images that I shot in the vertical orientation. And say Okay.

Now Photoshop is working on aligning my images. In here I have eight layers in my layers panel and each layer has a layer mask you turn off one of these layers, you see how Photoshop is stitched your photo together and created a layer mask for each of these areas. So you have these layers. If you ever want to go back to them, if you don’t want to use them, you can right-click and say Flatten the image and that will flatten all of those layers or you can create what is called a stamp visible layer that is shift option command E.

And this layer that it created is just a layer that has all these layers put together into that one layer. So if I ever want to go back to these layers, I just need to delete the stamp visible layer. So now let’s fix the outer edges of this panorama. So I used the 24 to 105 canon lens, and I shot vertically, but they’re still could be a little bit of lens correction to be done.

How to Straighten a Panorama Image

So with my top layer selected, if I come up here to filter lens correction. And if I click on custom, there’s a slider here that says Remove Distortion And if I just move it slightly, you could see what it’s doing. And that got rid of some of the white edges that I had. So then I’ll say, Okay, Photoshop did a pretty good job of stitching this together.

How to Remove the Transparency around the Image

There are a couple of ways that we can take care of this edge that is transparent all the way around. If this was a larger area of transparency, you could deal with it by using something like the lasso tool and lasso in an area. With something like this. And coming up here to edit content-aware file. The content-aware fill dialog comes up.

And so the area on the left you see my selection. The green area is the area that Photoshop is sampling from. On the right, you can see a preview of the area where Photoshop has corrected that transparency. And then all I would need to do is make sure that my output settings say output to current layer and I can say, okay. So that’ll help you if you have a big area and there are details that you want to be filled in.

The other things to do with the transparency is not too much you can use your clone stamp tool. “S” for the clone stamp and you can clone this all in just like this. It’s really going to depend on how much area that needs to be filled in and how much detail. But we don’t need to worry too much about the sky because we have other things to do with this sky.

So this was a beautiful day, but there were no clouds Let’s do something about our sky. In the Sky Replacement in Photoshop is working on this sky. And we’ve added clouds and we can choose any of the other skies that are available here in Photoshop. Let’s choose this sky right here can move the sky around. We want the sky a little bit brighter, output with this to a duplicate layer.

And say, Okay. Now you can go further with your panorama and say, Let’s convert this to a smart object and come up here to filter camera filter. And you can make adjustments with camera raw as if like you would do in Lightroom. Give it a little bit more vibrance, something like that, and just say, okay. So the next thing I would do would be if I was going to print, it would be to crop it.

I would create another stamp visible layer, and this would be the layer where I would do my crop I would hit “C” for the crop tool. And up here at the top where it says ratio, I would put in three and one. So this is if I wanted to crop it and print it, here’s a resource if you want to print a panorama.

These are the print size based on the aspect ratio. So I just chose a three to one aspect ratio. This chart tells you two aspect ratios and the width and height of your print sizes. So that’s how I got that number. And after I have my ratio put in my three to one ratio, make sure at the top that delete crop pixels is not checked and I do not have content-aware on right now. Then after you have it cropped and if you want to add a little bit of sharpening, I would add at this point. You can start off making your panorama with raw images.

How to make a Panorama using RAW Images

So I have some raw images on my computer and we’ll bring these in, select all the images. And it actually opened it up in camera raw because they are raw images.

Now all you need to do is select all your images and right-click and right here says Merged Panorama. Click on that and now camera raw has processed all my images and it did a very good job. Now you can click on some of these options to see there’s a difference. I’m going to leave it at spherical there are no edges to fill.

It did a good job. The auto-crop was already selected so you could see what it took out. So it did a very nice job of merging these photos together. I’m going to click on Merge. It gives you an opportunity to save this on your computer. And at this point, I can continue editing here in camera raw, and then I can click down here where it says Open. And it will open in Photoshop.

And so now if I want, I could add my sky and now I can crop my image if I want, and I could sharpen and have it printed.

See my photography website here ➡️ https://www.charlescabreraphotography.com

Read the previous blog article here ➡️ Masking in Premiere Pro – How to Easily Get Started