Panoramas Made Crazy Easy
Elements has had a feature to help you stitch multiple photos into a single panoramic photo for years now. As long as you did everything right in the camera (shooting on a tripod with just about every auto feature turned off), Photomerge worked pretty well. However, Photomerge is now so vastly improved that you can pretty much hand-hold your camera without regard to the auto settings, and Photomerge will not only perfectly align the photos, but now it will also seamlessly blend the pieces together, even if the exposure or white balance isn’t “on the money.” This is very cool stuff.
Step One:
Select the individual pieces of your pano in the Organizer. Here, I chose seven separate photos we’re going to stitch together into a panorama. Go under the File menu, under New, and choose Photomerge® Panorama, or simply open all seven photos in the Editor, then go under the File menu, under New, and choose Photomerge® Panorama.
SCOTT KELBY
Step Two:
In the Photomerge dialog, click on the button for Add Open Files, and your photos for the pano will appear in the center column. We’ll look at the Layout part in the next step, and jump down below that center column. Leave the Blend Images Together check-box turned on. There are two other options you may need, depending on how you shot your pano: (1) If you have lens vignetting (the edges of your images appear darkened), then turn on Vignette Removal (as I did here), and although it will take a little longer to render your pano, it will try to remove the vignetting during the process (it does a pretty decent job). If you’re using a Nikon, Sigma, or Canon fisheye lens to shoot your panos, turn on the Geometric Distortion Correction checkbox at the bottom to correct the fisheye distortion.
In the Layout section on the left, the default setting is Auto (as seen in Step Two), and I recommend leaving that set to Auto to get the standard wide pano we’re looking for. The five Layout choices below Auto (Perspective, Cylindrical, Spherical, Collage, and Reposition) all give you...well...funky looking panos—not the nice wide pano most of us are looking for—and the Interactive Layout brings back the “old” semi-manual way of stitching panos. So, let’s just stick with Auto. Click OK, and within a few minutes (depending on how many photos you shot for your pano), your pano is seamlessly stitched together (as seen here), and you’ll see status bars that let you know that Elements is aligning and blending your layers to make this mini-miracle happen.
Step Four:
To make your pano fit perfectly together, Photomerge has to move and rearrange things in a way that will cause you to have extra canvas around your final pano. That’s why the Clean Edges dialog will pop up. With it, you can have Elements try to fill in the blank space based on the image—it does an amazingly good job, although you may have to use the Clone Stamp tool (S) to finish it off. Or, you can click No, get the Crop tool (C), and drag out your cropping border (encompassing as much of the pano as possible without leaving any gaps).
