Inside Geek Canada
Powered by TubeMogul. For more information visit TubeMogul.com
Weekly Application and Tech Feature
Hello everyone, and thank you for tuning in into the Inside Geek Canada. My name is Evan Thies and today is our application tech feature and I am going to show you a small tutorial in Photoshop that you should be other quickly do in order to make panoramic photographs. And if you do not know what a panorama is, you can just Google it. And basically, it is the process of taking a lot of images, they are consecutive like in a row and combining them all together so looks like a nice cohesive long image. And I am sure you have seen some of them on billboards or posters and they look really amazing.
So I am going to show you Photoshop, an easy technique that you can use to what is called stitching and basically put these photos together. And Photoshop does a majority of the work for you, you have to basically just bring in the picture and it does all the work for you. Photoshop CS3 has improved this a lot from its previous version that did include some of this kind of panoramic features but it was no one as good as now. It is almost perfected to an art and the automated system is really great and there is almost no manual labor involvement in terms of putting the images or laying them at all.
So, let us go take a look in Photoshop here. All right, we are in the Photoshop here and first, I am just going to open one of my images or actually couple of my images to show you what photos I am going to kind of merge together here. So, if I go command or control O on the PC and I just open one of my images here. Now, the images that I choose to do were just a local reservoir near in my area.
And I just kind of went around the reservoir and took pictures with the trees and the waters, so this is one of the first one here. I open another one here. You can have a look, this is just the water and you know, it kind of goes consecutively just follow one to the other. I recommend if you are going to do a panoramic photograph, you actually use three or more images because that gets the best result and it makes a really great looking image.
So, in the Photoshop here, we are going to use a technique that Photoshop has, it is basically an automated script called photo merge. To the get to photo merge, you go to File, Automate and Photomerge. Now, there is multiple ways of doing this inside of Photoshop and also you can use Adobe Bridge to do this or you can also bring in the images, but I am just going to show you today in Photoshop.
So, this is the basic panel for photomerge. So on the left side here you have Layout. Now, this is basically how the images are going to be kind a blended together to make your panoramic photo. I like the Auto option the best because Photoshop just does its magic and basically, picks what should be best for your photographs. Perspective more it comes around you and kind of a square but it kind of looks a bit awkward because it just kind of comes together and it is off center somewhat. Cylindrical, is basically a great options if you kind of what almost a fish-eye and realistic kind of distorted look as it goes around the kind a 360 degree kind of look. Reposition interactive is ways you can actually move in and you precisely position the way that the photomerge is just going to happen.
So I am going to show a couple of examples here of how Photoshop actually does it. So, if you see here this tick box such as Blend images together. For now, I am going to take that off. Now, this is not going to get our desire of result but this is what I am going to show you just to make a point at first. So let us browse for files here and I do it six of this reservoir, so I am going to go Open. And I am going to click OK, and I was selected an Auto there.
[Demo]
All right, so our images formed. And right away, you can see the obviously difference at that check box made. It said, I unchecked it to make it not blend the images. I did this to show a specific point of how Photoshop does this.
First, what it does to make it panoramic is actually it just lines up the images and this is great, so if zoom in here, you can actually see they are basically just directly lining up how your images where and distorting them slightly. So if I made this invisible you can just see the layers are kind of blend in together. But it is not really, there is obvious seems and that is because I did not do it is all its entire magic to blend and line them up, which could be really useful in a way if you are just kind of try to line up images and accomplish something else. It is shows you right where the scenes are on your images and where basically we took the picture and how they line up.
To do the full blended version, let just close out of this and choose Do Not Save. And again, let us go to File, Automate and Photomerge once again. Let us do the same thing we did last time. Let us browse, let us select the images we want in the panoramic. And again, we have auto selected and this time, we are going to leave Blend images together on, and go ahead click OK.
[Demo]
And there you go, it is loaded all together. Now for blending, you can clearly see the difference. It is actually scaled and cut off a lot of these pictures and it kind of does a crisscross cut in here. So, if I were to tag one of the layers here, you can see it basically cuts into these images to make the best blend possible and perfectly launch of everything and you can see it is quite well done.
So now, once you have this image, which is probably we are going to do is just crop this down, so if you push the C button on your keyboard, you get the Crop Tool. So let us just go ahead and just crop all the portion over here. It does not have to be precise but just you know, so you do not get all the screed edges and you go ahead and press return or enter. And there you go. Take a look at that, it looks pretty much seamless if zoom in here and if you a high resolution camera, it can go forever and it just gives you basically default 360 look.
And the great thing is, when I took this photos, I was definitely not on a tripod. I was hardly standing still. There is a lot of fluctuation and lighting and the way I move and Photoshop still manage to merge them quite well like I mean, it is almost perfect. There is a few light discrepancies here or there but it does not really make much of a different in the over all tone. So that is a basic tutorial on Photoshop CS3 on how to make a panoramic photograph using the photomerge function.
So that was a basic tutorial in Photoshop on how to use the photomerge feature to put together panoramic photographs. If you have any questions about this tutorial or any tech questions you want to ask me, you can email me at evan@insidegeek.ca and I can take your questions there and hopefully, get back to you as soon as possible. And thanks for watching this video and will see you online.
Inside Geek Canada
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services