Photoshop: Creating a Panorama

March 10, 2005 10:18 AM

I'm trying to create a panoramic landscape view from several photographs in Photoshop. How do I go about making the colors/tones of the sky & snow match from photo to photo?
posted by skwm to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Have a look at the tools available on the panotools.info site
Panotools wiki especially the enblend tools.
posted by stuartmm at 10:40 AM on March 10, 2005

You lock the white balance, exposure, etc. on your camera before you take the first photograph.
posted by kindall at 10:49 AM on March 10, 2005

PS CE has a wizard-y thing to do just that ,though it distorts the image quite a bit.
posted by signal at 10:59 AM on March 10, 2005

One strong vote for Panorama Tools, it's excellent. If you use either PTAssembler or PTGUI, two front ends for the (free) PanoTools stitcher, they have nice front ends that will automatically invoke enblend as necessary. Panotools has some color matching built in that actually works pretty well on the stuff that I've done.

If you're using Photoshop to stitch, Photoshop 7.0 has color matching capabilities.
posted by brool at 11:32 AM on March 10, 2005

Actually, Kindall has it correct. The best way to do this is to prepare for the contingency at the source: lock all the relevant exposure factors before you shoot. This forces the colors and tones to be true in each frame of the scene. Much, much easier than trying to take care of the problem after the fact.

(This is actually great advice for nearly all photographic problems. It's almost always easier to compensate for expected difficulties at the time the photograph is created than to edit the photo later.)
posted by jdroth at 12:13 PM on March 10, 2005

Also, you didn't specify what version of Photoshop you have, but Photoshop CS has a command specifically for this: File > Automate > Photomerge
posted by jeremias at 7:02 PM on March 10, 2005

Do these tools by any chance also work with Photoshop Elements, the software that came free with our Canon 10d?

Locking the settings I imagine would involve setting them to be best at some point in the middle of the range of lighting for the pan (ie, from the light to the dark side, assuming it's not noon)
posted by Goofyy at 9:19 PM on March 10, 2005

Hugin works well for my windfarm photomontages. It has the advantage of offering an alternative stitching engine to the PTStitcher one, it's cross-platform, and very easy to use.
posted by scruss at 5:42 AM on March 13, 2005