Photoshop: Creating a panoramic photo

If you don’t have a panoramic camera, no worries. Photoshop makes panoramic pictures for you!

Before, it used take a lot of time to try to stitch photos together manually. Photoshop does it all for you automatically.

1. Take pictures by standing in one spot and moving the lens from one side to the other. Make sure there are elements in your picture that overlap so Photoshop can match the pictures easily.

Left side of room:

Right side of room:

2. In Photoshop, go to File > Automate > Photomerge.

3. The Photomerge dialog box pops up. There are different types of layouts you can do but for now we are going with the default auto setting. Click Browse.

Select your files. (You can select multiple files by holding down the Command  key (Control on PC)).

4. You will now see all sorts of flashing images going on in your screen. At the end, your picture will look something like this.

5. Sometimes there is a bit of extreme skewing that goes on, which can be fixed (more on that in another post). But let’s assume this picture looks good the way it is. Now it’s time to make it more of a usable shape.

Click the crop tool.

Draw the crop tool to create a border around where you want the image to cut off the edges. This is cropping the picture so all the weird angles get cut off.

6. Once the crop border is where you want it, hit Return.

Your photo will now be a nice rectangular shape.

You can edit this photo further if you’d like. I lightened it up a bit because it looked kind of dark.

Photomerge is not always consistent. I used the same two pictures and did a Photomerge two different times and the restuls came out different. The picture above had the right side more skewed. The picture below had the left side more skewed. I did twiddle with the left side below so it looks less skewed, but the original result had the screen looking quite angular.

You can tell the differences between the pictures above and below by looking at the screens.

In any case, it’s sure a handy tool if you don’t have a lens wide enough to capture a whole room or landscape!