Making Panoramic Pictures
By John Sweeney - 16th of January 2007
There is plenty of software out there that will assist with turning your pictures into a panoramic view, all you do is drag them to a particular spot on the software and ask the software to stitch them and wait for the result. Don't knock it, it works.
Now, until Photoshop CS there was no automated programme to help you to stitch your images together automatically, but, of course, you can still stitch pictures together in Photoshop 6 or 7, simple it isn't, but follow the instructions and it can be done.
- First, open the 3 or 4 pictures that you intent to stitch together and lay them out in order from left to right on your desktop.
- Click on and select the left most picture because that is to be the anchor. Let us, for the purpose of this exercise, suppose that you have 3 pictures that you want to stitch together into one image.
- All the pictures should, ideally be the same size, i.e. 800 pixels by 600 pixels for example.
- Check the size of the first picture by clicking on Image, on the toolbar, then Image size, this will give you the pixel dimensions, i.e. 800 pixels by 600 pixels.
- Now, if you are only going to stitch 3 pictures together all you need to do is multiply the horizontal pixel dimensions by 3, i.e. 600 pixels wide = 1800 pixels in total. You do not need to change the vertical size.
- Now cancel the image size pallet and open Image and Canvas size. You will see a new pallet and at the bottom of the pallet there is a box with 8 arrows pointing in various directions. Click on the top left hand corner arrow because that is where you are going to place your first image in the new canvas you are now developing.
- In the size boxes put 1800 in the width size and 800 in the height size and make sure that the box below that marked relative is ticked.
- Further down towards the bottom of the pallet you may get a chance to select the colour of your new canvas, if you do not remember to make sure that the black and white colours are in their proper place on your toolbar. When you are satisfied that you have done everything click ok.
- The first picture you have selected is now in position on a new canvas, all you have to do is drag picture 2 and picture 3 into their places on the new canvas.
- Whilst you are trying to position each picture in turn in it's proper place, each overlapping the other just reduce the opacity of each layer in turn, on the layers pallet (F7 on your keyboard), and, when each picture is in place bring the opacity back to 100 %.
- Now, you may need to do some adjustments to each picture to make each compatible with the others, take your time.
- When all 3 pictures are in place flatten the image, from the layers pallet, remember, that little arrowhead on the top right just below the white cross.
- All that remains to be done is to crop the image, select the crop tool from your toolbar, (click the letter C on your keyboard,) and crop the image. You can, of course, do some more work on the image to alter colours etc if you need to.
- You are finished, Now save the image and give it a name.
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