For a greater level of control over your panorama-making process, I suggest the following camera and software processing tricks:
- Shoot in Manual Metering mode. Make a test shot in the approximate middle of the proposed scene and use that as your base exposure.
- Shoot with the Auto Focus turned Off. Manually focus on the scene and leave it off for the entire sequence.
- Use a leveled tripod.
- Some professionals even create a custom White Balance setting for the panorama because, in some situations, the light, and therefore the color, might change between section one and section five.
- If you think that you have forgotten to include one bit of the scene, it's fine to reshoot an area that you think you might have missed. The sequence order isn't important. I have actually mixed verticals with angled and horizontal images in one panorama and it still finds the edges and stitches them together perfectly.
- If the Automatic function doesn't pull everything together correctly, try again and use one of the other options: Perspective, Cylindrical, Spherical, Collage, or Reposition. One of these is bound to work!
These Settings options can also be useful to experiment with:
- Blend images together should always be used—unless you want to reposition each section manually and then adjust each layer's tone manually (time-consuming).
- Vignette Removal: Some lenses tend to be darker at the edges than in the center of the lens. Merging two vignetted sections together makes this look even worse. This feature lightens the edges and gets rid of the problem.
- Geometric Distortion Correction: This helps when there's optical distortion in the image, typically when you're shooting things such as architecture and straight lines.
- Content Aware Fill Transparent Areas: Even panoramas shot meticulously, with a tripod, might not end up looking 100% rectilinear. When this occurs, Elements create a space to fill in the unevenness, leaving you with the options of either cropping it to a proper rectangle, leaving it as is, or filling it with this auto intelligence.
Considering that you are effectively combining multiple high-resolution files into one panorama, don't be surprised if the final version is hundreds of megabytes in size. Elements will automatically save this new creation as Untitled_panorama1.jpg, unless you specifically give it a real name.
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