Imagine standing in front of a great vista with your camera poised, but you doubt that the one or two pictures you will take, will do the scene justice.

What is the solution?

The answer is to turn to the Photomerge tool within Photoshop Elements or Photoshop CS.

What is Photomerge?

The Photomerge command will merge a series of panoramic images and blend them together into one. Neat eh? However, this tool is the only tool we can think of where we need to shoot the pictures specially for the process. There are a few rules that we need to follow at the shooting stage, but nothing too difficult and it is mostly common sense really.

As we shoot the series of pictures we need to give ourselves about a 30% overlap from image to image. We may get away with an overlap of about 20%, but if it is less than that, Photomerge may not be able to create our panorama effectively. Having said that, we should not overlap images too much. An overlap of 50% or more can make the blending less smooth.

We must also avoid using the zoom on our camera while taking the pictures or once again Photomerge will have difficulty with what we are asking of it.
We should also try and keep the camera level and using a tripod with a rotating head will be a great help.

We should also take all the pictures from the same viewpoint. Don’t walk a few paces to get a better view or the continuation of the Photomerge will be spoilt.

Lastly, it will be better if you can select a manual color balance on your camera and a manual exposure setting. Our series of pictures will then not vary greatly between each shot making our panorama more successful.

There are quite a few things to remember there, but here is a confession. We didn’t follow any of these for our example shots. This was because we didn’t consider Photomerge at the time of taking them. We just stood on the spot and took the 6 images below with a swivel to the right after each shot, so how will Photomerge handle these pictures.

We start by selecting Photomerge from the File Menu as we show below.

We will then be presented with the browser window for us to select our images.

We can then click the browse button and locate our images on our computer, high light all our pictures and click open.

Our images will then appear in the browser window we had earlier and we can click OK as we show below.

Now is the time to make the coffee as Elements goes to work on our images.

Before we return with our coffee, Photoshop will have given us the first draft of our panorama. In our example Photoshop did a pretty fine job, but we could see a few areas where the sky was not blended as smooth as we would like. It is also a large palette that we have had to reduce here.

If we then tick the advance blending box we can hit the preview button for an idea of what the final image will look like. The blends will now be much better and we can complete the process by hitting the OK button.

Now is the time to drink that coffee you made as Photoshop performs its final wonders.

We may find our image has some blank areas, but not to worry as we can fix those later.

First we need to select the crop tool from the toolbar to crop the panorama into shape.

We can then click and drag out the crop tool shape and adjust it with the toggles around the outer edge. Hit the enter key or click the tick on the options bar to finalize the crop. This may leave us with a blank area at the top left, but we can put that right using our clone tool.

Select the clone tool from the toolbar as we show below.

While holding the Alt key down click into the sky area close to the top left. This will sample pixels and we can then release the Alt key and using a soft edged brush paint those pixels into place over the gap.

We then have a great panorama.