Olympus OM-D E-M5
Fujifilm FinePix F770EXR
Nikon D4
Nikon Coolpix S9300
Ricoh GXR A16 24-85mm
Nikon Coolpix P510
Canon PowerShot SX260 HS
Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ30
Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX200V
How to Take Great Panorama Photos
In addition, you'll need to lock your exposure after deciding what you feel will expose best for all the variations in light in the area you'll be photographing.
If you don't lock your exposure you will get what is known as "banding." Banding is when you have all different exposure values (darker and lighter) showing like slices throughout the many pieces in a stitched panorama.
I typically begin by setting my camera to “Aperture Priority” (Av) mode and then moving the f-stop setting to either f/11 or f/13, for maximum depth of field, carefully checking the view finder to note the shutter speed that the camera has automatically chosen to get a properly exposed picture.
I next switch to Manual mode and dial in that f-stop and shutter speed.
Very often you will be taking pictures where the sun is on one side of the picture and it can be quite dark or shaded in other parts. While some panoramic stitching programs are fairly good at equalizing the exposures, there will still be a lot of ugly variation in your finished file unless you lock the exposure.
So, now let's begin... We'll use this panorama as an example:
Illustration: Sunrise on Blue Hill Bay, Blue Hill, Maine: a 10 image panorama.
Each shot you take should be overlapped by 20 to 25% as you will get better stitching results.
While using a tripod is important, a wonderful thing I have discovered is that you can often take a handheld pano--even a very long one. As long as it is bright enough to handhold the camera at a fast enough shutter speed to avoid motion blur, you can stand in one central place, hold the camera at eye level and pivot at the hip from left to right or right to left, and you can get quite level panoramas, like this one, taken after a three hour climb that I knew adding the 12-pound weight of my tripod to wouldn't work for me:
Illustration: Tumbledown Mountain, Weld, Maine - a 20 image, 180 degree handheld panorama.
I have even done handheld 360 degree panoramas, like this one:
Illustration: Tommy's Park, Portland, Maine - a 45-image handheld panorama, stitched in Little Planet Projection using PTGui.
Finally, let's talk about how to put your panorama together. I sometimes use a program called PTGui, but mostly Photoshop CS4 stitches them together with great results. Not everyone has Photoshop OR PTGui of course... And there are quite a few free stitching programs out there to download that people have great success with, such as Hugin and ArcSoft Panorama Maker.
For ease of explanation, I'll demonstrate how I put together a panorama in Photoshop CS4.
Begin in Photoshop by selecting File> Automate> Photomerge:
Next, make sure you make the selections as circled below:
- Auto Layout
- Blend Images Together
- Vignette Removal
- Geometric Distortion Correction. Then click the Browse button to select the files you want to stitch together.
When your files are selected in the Source Files box, as seen below, click OK and let the pano-making begin!
It will take anywhere from ten minutes to an hour or so, depending on several factors:
- The number of files.
- The size of the files.
- How level each shot is.
- The computer's CPU speed and amount of memory.
- If you are using Photoshop CS4 in 32-bit or 64-bit.
You can expect your output file to look something like this:
Notice how the edges are rough and the right side curves upward a little? Apparently, I didn't have my camera as level as I thought I did! This is easily fixed in Photoshop by using the Warp command.
Before doing this, you'll need to flatten the many layers of your pano by clicking on: Layer Menu> Flatten Image. Once it has flattened, press <Control J> to make a new layer via copy. And then go to Edit> Transform> Warp:
A grid will be placed over your entire image (see below). You can pull on any of the dots or corners to re-shape your pano exactly as you'd like it by clicking on them and dragging gently in the directions you want to go. Notice how in the large red oval the off-kilter horizon has been mostly corrected. You can continue “warping” your pano until you're satisfied with the results.
And then, simply click on the Crop tool in the tools palette and a window will pop up, asking if you'd like to apply the transformation. Click apply, and after a few seconds, your pano will be ready to crop.
Now use the crop tool to crop the boundaries of the panorama, because your photo actually extends behind the area you can currently see. That extra area will be shown when you print it unless you crop it first. Click twice within the picture, allowing the crop to happen, like so:
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Olympus OM-D E-M5 Review
Fujifilm FinePix F770EXR Review
Nikon D4 Review
Nikon Coolpix S9300 Review
Ricoh GXR A16 24-85mm Review
Nikon Coolpix P510
Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ30
Fujifilm X-Pro1
Canon PowerShot SX260 HS
Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX200V
#1 Michael Baldwin
All i shoot is panoramics. I own a panasonic FZ50 so i cant use a wide angle so i stitch everything.I also include HDR so a 20 image panoramic turns out to use 60 images with the different exposures. If anyone is interested my work can be found http://wreck-photography.deviantart.com/
Great article. Thanks
10:54 am - Tuesday, September 28, 2010
#2 Nikhil Ramkarran
Sensational tutorial Cynthia. I haven’t done any panoramas for my photo a day project, and I am now tempted to remedy that. In fact, I just thought of a subject. Thanks.
12:13 pm - Tuesday, September 28, 2010
#3 Alice
Thank you! I now have an idea for my university project!
1:32 pm - Tuesday, September 28, 2010
#4 John Cantrell
In my experience, using a wide-angle lens just lowers the apparent resolution of the final panorama… The point of taking panoramas for many people is not just the wide-format view, but also ca “virtual” photograph with resolution many times higher than the camera’s. For instance, a minimum “35 mm camera equivalent” focal length for a sharp pano using a 10Mp digital camera (just an example) is 35mm-40mm.
Instead, zoom moderately into your scene (45mm is a good place to start) and snap many overlapping pics of it, then just trust the component images to one of the many excellent free stitcher softwares (MS ICE is free and pretty good). You’ll be much happier with the final results (sharper, clearer, more detail) than if you use fewer images taken at an extreme wide angle setting.
Another important point is that the closer the subject is to you, the less successful the stitch will be (I think this is probably why the poster recommends wide-angle, which has greater and more forgiving depth of field). Some comments about pivoting the camera around the lens’s nodal point would have been appropriate (for instance: how to estimate the nodal point, how to hold the camera when pivoting). Putting your camera on a tripod will likely not pivot the camera properly for objects close to the camera. Most of the time you just don’t need a tripod, or even the special adapters available for panoramas. Modern panorama software (such as MS ICE) automatically fixes rotation/parallax issues, lens distortion, and exposure inconsistencies (but not focus, unfortunately). It’s amazing.
Finally, the suggestion to use RAW is silly IMO. Raw processing adds considerably to the process of getting to the final image and acts as a barrier to spontaneous creativity by delaying the final result. Most people don’t need it. Modern camera jpg engines are quite adequate for the majority of photographers. On the other hand, if you have a fetish about sitting at the computer all day fiddling with software just to get an adequate image out of the RAW files (when the jpg the camera produced is perfectly adequate…) well, then, have at it.
So: it usually isn’t necessary to use a tripod, don’t waste your time with wide-angle + RAW to recover a modicum of additional sharpness. Instead: handhold your camera, zoom-in a little bit on your subject (but don’t use telephoto unless your subject is very far away), pivot the camera NOT your body, and save to jpg instead.
You will take more panoramas and be happier with both the process and the results.
(My 2 cents worth).
1:33 pm - Tuesday, September 28, 2010
#5 Thomas
The Wiki of the Panotools Community is at http://wiki.panotools.org/
2:36 pm - Tuesday, September 28, 2010
#6 Charlie Self
Neat article Cindy. As usually, someone is eager to post another method, taking you to task for not doing it his way.
Most techniques in photography can be adapted and changed to suit the photographer, the camera, the location and the customer. I generally shoot raw+ for most everything, so I can work either way without a hitch.
Sometime in the next few weeks I hope to get out and try your method. I may also try John Cantrell’s method…maybe at the same time—though I very much doubt I’ll work without a tripod.
I’m not interested in adding another program to my repertoire, so I’ll first check out how the programs I already have work with panoramas.
Thanks for the article!
3:01 pm - Tuesday, September 28, 2010
#7 John Cantrell
Not really a method… just some easier-to-use-and-less-expensive guidelines. The only method one should always observe is to make sure you overlap the images properly. Nothing worse than coming home with missing a component.
I placed a link in my URL to some of my panos on Picasa. They were composed from handheld jpgs made with an 8MP Sony T100 pocket camera, stitched with AutoStitch (freeware), and are representative of what’s achievable w/o use of a tripod, raw, dslr, etc. The images are greatly reduced (1600 pix) for Picasa… some of the originals are over 100Mp and of course much sharper than the Picasa versions!
3:34 pm - Tuesday, September 28, 2010
#8 Ethan Parker
I learned several tricks from the handheld panos I’ve been taking for several years now:
1)Software; I’ve tried several products and I’ve settled on Microsoft’s Image Composite Editor (“ICE”) over Hugin or Photoshop because it produces great results, is very capable of dealing with handheld photos and making the best of what you give it, is incredibly easy to use, and free.
2) Take lots of photos with at least 30% overlap.
3) For camera settings, never use the flash and force your camera to use the same white balance setting for all shots. For all the blending capabilities of ICE adjacent photos need to have the same tone/hue. It’s ok to leave other settings like focus and exposure on auto.
4) For each shot rotate your camera around an imaginary point located at the approximate center of where you think your image sensor is located. This means that you need to rotate your body around the camera instead of simply standing in one spot and rotating your body. The significance of this depends on how close your subject is. If your foreground it close it makes a big big difference. If you’re shooting a landscape with very little foreground then it matters much less.
If you care to, you can see a couple results of my efforts at http://photosynth.net/userprofilepage.aspx?user=ePrime&content=Synths
5:41 pm - Tuesday, September 28, 2010
#9 Peter Smith
Thanks Cindy for your clear instructions. I have observed many of your panoramic photos with awe and can’t wait to try it out myself.
Peter (labnut)
5:59 pm - Tuesday, September 28, 2010
#10 Kingsley
Thanks for that comprehensive post Cindy - you should be commended.
Learnt some things and that is all that is important!
Sad others like to take the opportunity to stand on their soap-boxes!!
Appreciate your efforts…
3:08 pm - Wednesday, September 29, 2010
#11 John Cantrell
Sorry some of you think that was soap-boxing. I meant no disrespect. But my attitude is that the pros and advanced amateurs already know the stuff conveyed in that post and that the pano newbies who read it could well be discouraged by it, perceiving (incorrectly) that the costs, logistics, and learning curve barriers to good panoramas are high, the effort intimidating. If you have a camera, you’re “in”... go forth and make panoramas!
3:26 pm - Wednesday, September 29, 2010
#12 ScottyV
Panorama is something i haven’t ventured into yet, thanks for the tips. Breaking out the tripod this weekend!
3:41 am - Sunday, October 31, 2010
#13 Brian
You say to shoot in raw, but in your Photoshop example you are loading in JPG’s? Can you load in raw files to edit afterwards as a whole, and are they kept in raw format after the pano is made? If not, how do you pp them evenly as separate photo’s first?
6:19 pm - Tuesday, April 5, 2011
#14 Charlie Self
I don’t understand why this came to me for comment, but the answer is quite simple: you shoot in raw because it contains all the available information in a format that itself does not change. You do the work you wish to do on the file, then save as a JPEG, TIFF or other end result file.
Most photo editors have the ability to handle raw files of most types.
7:13 pm - Tuesday, April 5, 2011
#15 Claudiu B
Thank you very much ! would love to find out the blur effect on the side of the photo ...
7:18 pm - Tuesday, May 17, 2011
#16 Miekl Mauze
this is the best howto I have read on panos, well done and thanks
7:51 am - Tuesday, August 2, 2011
#17 elvinson
wonderful post, i have sony hx9v camera, i am finding very hard to take 360 panorama, but after reading this i got some idea, i will upload some in
http://www.shortstoriesshort.com.Thanks
4:55 pm - Wednesday, February 15, 2012