- Now that you've got all the images loaded
and selected into the Photomerge dialogue,
it's important to choose how those images
are going to get stitched together.
Depending upon your version of Photoshop,
you'll find different choices,
but all of them have the ultimate goal in mind of
merging things into a cohesive panoramic photo.
As we take a look here, the first option is pretty
much always auto, and this is just going to guess.
Now, auto is fine if you don't want to take precise control.
Photoshop will look at the images
and try to make the best fit.
Perspective is great for print panoramic photos.
This works best if you have a strong center object,
and then you want to wrap things out to the side
to keep a straight horizon line.
Now if we were intending to make a printed
version of this panorama, I would choose
perspective and make sure that the center
photo was the Lincoln Memorial
so things branched out to the sides.
Cylindrical is going to take the images
and wrap them around the inside of a cylinder.
In this case, that's the more likely choice,
but because of the way that this was shot
on a wide angle lens, I might be
able to get by with spherical.
It's really ultimately up to you and the projection
method and you can decide to run it both ways.
If you were choosing something to just make a collage,
this allows you to combine multiple photos together,
and sometimes this is done not with a true panorama,
but more similar photos shot all at
one location you want to composite.
If you have a large object that was scanned
in separate pieces, or you used a camera stand
to shoot it, well this allows you to just move
the pieces so that the puzzle pieces line up,
but it won't do any bending or
warping to try to maintain a horizon.
In this case, let's go with cylindrical,
look things over once more, we'll choose
the vignette removal, we'll blend the images together,
and take advantage of the geometric distortion.
With all of that loaded, I can click "OK",
and it will begin the process.
It now needs to open up every single image
and load it into a single Photoshop file.
This means that it's going to read the
Camera Raw files and then start to
load them into separate layers.
You'll notice here that it does it for each photo,
and then puts it onto a new layer.
There's my first image, and now it keeps going.
This may take some time, so let's go ahead and
let this finish, and then we'll come back
and explore it a little bit later.
Once the images are loaded, it will
attempt to align all the pieces.
This is it's looking for the overlap, and trying
to decide how to put all of the puzzle pieces together.
Photoshop will shift the layers slightly up and down,
as well as bend them and look for key details.
This is why you shot with at least 25% overlap
so that it had something to work with
as it takes a look at the photo itself.
Once it's put all the layers in the right places,
it will look at them and attempt to make small
changes in exposure so that you don't see any color banding.
Photoshop tries very hard to be smart and
take advantage of any masking or blending to
avoid shifts in color or exposure.
This is a combination of shooting it the right way
and allowing the post processing to make
minor adjustments on your behalf.
There's our image, and you can see all the pieces.
In this case because of the way that the
panorama was shot, we have a little bit of
duplication of the object on both sides, but this is great.
It's taken a look and intelligently massed.
Now you might see some small lines here.
As you zoom in, those will disappear,
once you get to a suitable magnification level.
In this case, it latched onto the Lincoln Memorial
as the center of our shot, which is great,
and now we just need to move onto some cleanup,
but before we start to clean this up,
lets save our file in case we were to accidentally
close the program or need to revert.
We'll simply call this "Lincoln Memorial
Full", and capture that psd file.
Now eventually, I'll get rid of this layered
document, because it's quite large
and will occupy a lot of disc space,
but it's good to save it in the short term.
Once that's saved, we can move onto some cleanup.