So, you’re on holiday surrounded by the most spectacular views, but try as you might you just can’t capture the whole scene in one photograph. We’ve all been there, and it’s frustrating to say the least, but don’t fret Photoshop will save the day! In this tutorial I will show you how to stitch a panorama together in Photoshop from several photos.
This panorama of Alnwick Castle is what we’ll be creating today. The source photographs are included for you to download at the end of the tutorial, taken on my recent holiday to Northumberland (UK). If there are any Harry Potter fans amongst you, you may recognise the castle from Harry’s first flying lesson in The Philosopher’s Stone.
The first thing we will need to do is save the photos to a folder. Once you’ve done that, open up Photoshop and from the File menu select Automate and then Photomerge.
In the Layout area of the Photomerge dialogue box select Auto. Leave Source Files as Files and click Browse. Navigate to the folder where you have saved the five Alnwick Castle photographs, select them all and click OK. Finally, check the boxes for Blend Images Together, Vignette Removal and Geometric Distortion Correction at the bottom of the box and click OK.
Photoshop will now match the overlapping areas of the photographs. As this is quite a complex process you may have to wait a few minutes while the panorama is created.
Once Photoshop has finished the Photomerge process, select all of the layers in the Layers panel and from the Layers menu choose Merge Layers (CTRL+E, or CMD+E if you’re using a Mac). Phew, that was a lot of ‘layers’!
Select the Crop tool and draw a crop selection from the edge of the lowest point of the sky to the grass just underneath the tent. Don’t worry about the transparent area in the bottom-right, we’ll come back to that in the next step. Once you are happy with the selection press Enter or Return.
Now to deal with that empty area in the bottom-right. This is a bit of a quick and dirty process, but the results are good, especially when considering how quickly they are achieved. Using the Lasso Tool (L) draw around the transparent area (staying as tight to it as possible when going over the grass). Include the handrail, as it’s rather unsightly. You should now see the ‘marching ants’ around the selection you’ve just made.
From the Edit menu select Fill (SHIFT+F5) and in the Contents section of the dialogue box that appears make sure that Use is set to Content Aware and click OK. Et voilà, we have grass! It’s not perfect, but it’s better than the gaping hole of nothing that we had before. Repeat this process for any patches of grass that you feel don’t look quite right.
I think our panorama would look better without any people on the grass. Using the same method as before, select all of the people on the luscious greenery of the castle’s bailey and remove them.
Let’s make a few adjustments to the tonal range of our image to make it look a bit more vibrant. In the Adjustments panel click on the Curves icon, this will create a new adjustment layer, which is non-destructive. Adjust the control points of the curve until you are happy with the results, or alternatively use one of the pre-defined settings under the Preset drop-down such as Lighter.
With our panorama almost complete all that’s left to do is sharpen the image using the High Pass filter. Press CTRL+A to Select All, then from the Edit menu select Copy Merged (SHIFT+CTRL+C). Paste the copied image at the top of the layer stack.
With the top layer still selected go to the Filter menu and choose Other then High Pass. Adjust the Radius in the dialogue box so that you can make out subtle detail in the grey background. Once you are satisfied click OK. Next, change the layer’s blending mode to Overlay and it’s Opacity to around 45%. This is a very subtle effect, which you will mainly notice on the castle’s brickwork.
That’s it, our panorama of Alnwick Castle is now complete! No more struggling to capture the perfect holiday snap in a single shot.
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