Overview

Panoramic images have always been a very inspiring aspect of photography. Until now, making these types of pictures has been restricted to a small set of lucky individuals who are fortunate enough to own the specialized cameras needed to capture the wide images. With the onset of the latest image-editing packages, software manufacturers have now started to include features that allow users with standard cameras to create wonderful wide-angle vistas digitally. See Figure 9.1.

Figure 9.1: Many digital editing packages like Elements now include stitching packages that allow you to make dramatic panoramas from standard camera images.

These extra pieces of software are sometimes referred to as stitching programs, as their actual function is to combine a series of photographs into a single picture. The edge details of each successive image are matched and blended so that the join is not detectable. See Figure 9.2.

Figure 9.2: The panorama is made by stitching sequentially shot images together.

Once all the photographs have been combined, the result is a picture that shows a scene of any angle of anything up to a full 360 . See Figure 9.3.

Figure 9.3: The stitched result can be made up of many individual images and can encompass a view up to a full 360 . (1) Individual source photos. (2) Stitched panorama. (3) 360 spinning panorama.

Photomerge (Editor: File > New > Create Photomerge Panorama) is included free within Elements and is Adobe's version of the stitching technology. The version of Photomerge that was supplied...