photoshop: panoramic stitching

A few weeks ago, Corey (the lovely model above) and I explored an abandoned house in Jamul, and while I took plenty of photos (mostly of Corey), this ended up being my favorite. When I asked her to stand in the middle of this road, I knew I wanted to essentially turn that top photo into the bottom photo by stitching a bunch of images together in Photoshop.

What makes this photo-stitch especially cool is that because I took all the individual shots using my 85mm lens at the maximum aperture of f/1.8, the final image has an exaggerated shallow depth-of-field while still achieving a wider angle of view. Disclaimer: I did not invent this method in the least. I first read about how to do it a couple years ago on Ryan Brenizer's blog (he didn't invent it either, just basically developed another use of panoramic stitching). If you want to read more in-depth about the method and how it works exactly, this post is extremely helpful.

For the purposes of this blog post, I simply want to share the steps I took to make this image, and what it looked in Photoshop as I was making it.

So this is the first photo I took. I shot it hand-held, with my focus set to Automatic, and my settings were 1/4000 of a second, f/1.8 at 100 ISO. Easy peasy.

Now this is the part where I took several photos of the space surrounding the image that I just took. I asked Corey to step out of the frame, I set my focus to manual, and I made sure to keep my camera settings exactly the same. I started at the top left and worked my way clockwise, overlapping my images as I went. The number of images you shoot is up to you, but you don't need a gazillion to make a good panorama. For this, I only used 12.

Now the fun part! I opened up Photoshop and went to File > Automate > Photomerge.

This window opened up, and I clicked Browse to select all the images I wanted to use. I made sure that the Layout was set to Auto and to check the box next to Geometric Distortion Correction.

This is the part where Photoshop does all the hard stitching work for you, while you can sit back, relax, make a cup of tea, pet your cat, whatever. Depending on how many images you use and how large the files are (mine were full-sized jpgs), this part can take several minutes. Just be patient.

Okay, don't freak out when you get to this point. Yes, this looks ugly as hell, but Photoshop isn't done yet. It's still working its magic. Like I said, paaatience.

Now we're getting somewhere! The stitching is complete. But as you can clearly see, my panorama isn't perfect. I could've taken some more photos to fill in the empty spaces, especially in the bottom left.

And this is just show you what the pixel dimensions were before I cropped the image. 8150 x 6210 pixels. 144 megabytes! Pretty huge. Which is another great thing about photo-stitching: because you're combining so many files, you get a much higher resolution image without any loss in quality. Which is perfect if I wanted to print this at a huge size.

So this is what it looked like after I cropped out the white spaces, and even so, it left a very large image to work with. The rest was just color and curve adjustments, and some sharpening.

And here's one more example of using this method that I did a few years ago. First is the original "before" shot...

 

...And the final image...

 

:)