Panorama Stitching with Photoshop

This is a tutorial for beginners as well as professionals who'd like to know how to stitch in Photoshop. Just pick out the steps that are interesting for you.

Shooting the photos
Stitching in Photoshop
Correcting the Panorama
Color Correction in Photoshop

Shooting the photos

First of all for shooting a panorama you need a pod to fix your camera on.
It may work without a pod, but it's way easier to get good results with a small pod like this.

When shooting the pictures look for an overlap of at least 20° from one photo to the next.
This will ensure enough room for corrections, if it doesn't fit perfectly. As we are not adjusting the camera lens to the absolute center of rotation, we'll not shoot perfectly fitting photos anyway. But that's no problem for the way we'll work on the photos.

Another thing you should be aware of. The bigger the difference of lightness from one side of the panorama to the other, the more difficult it is to create smooth transitions. The hardest panoramas to do are mostly the ones directly shot towards a strong shining sun. You can try to help this by adjusting the exposure time for each photo to get smoother brightness-transitions.

Stitching in Photoshop

You begin by starting Photoshop and opening the Photomerge function.

Right after that you are asked to define which photos should be used for stitching.

You need to switch to "Files", delete all files out of the list (these are the ones you had previously opened in Photoshop) and click on search.

After selecting click on ok.
A script starts to open all images and tries to adjust them automatically.

You probably get a result like this:

The top line of thumbnails shows the photos that Photoshop was not able to include into this panorama. Don't get irritated by this.
Photoshop often puts photos above each other or stitches wrongly.

Now it's your job to align everything. You should start by clicking and dragging the pictures. Sort the ones you'll try later into the thumbnail gallery. You can place pictures all over the workspace. When they are close to each other, Photoshop will automatically snap them in (wether they fit or not), so be exact when positioning the photos. There are several tools helping you on the adjustment:

The arrow-tool allows you to move the pictures around. The rotation-tool is the one I used most on this panorama. I wanted the horizontal line to be straight, so I had to rotate alot. The third tool from top is the perspective tool. I didn't find a useful situation for it yet. The zoom- and hand-functions are helpful to have a better view on whats going on. Photoshop often puts some photos outside the working space.So you can zoom out to be sure you didnt forget to place a photo.

When you adjusted the photos be sure to deactivate the little box on the right side called "additional fading" and activate "keep as layers".

Click ok and let the script stitch the panorama for you. This may take a while.

Correcting the Panorama

Press C on your keyboard to select the crop-tool. Crop your Panorama in a way that only few unfilled parts are left inside the selection (click and drag). Be sure that there's no cropping width and height as well as no resolution set in the cropping options at the top of the working space. These fields must be blank.

Press enter to crop.

Now's the time for some painting, masking and stamping.

Sort the layers in a way that you see the single images running diagonally across the palette window.

This makes it much easier to edit as the images are above each other from left (top layer) to right (bottom layer).

Start with the top layer. Thats the image on the very left.
Create a layer mask by clicking on the icon in the layer palette.

Press B for the brush tool. Start painting a smooth transition between the first and the second image.

Do this step for all images.

Sometimes you need the stamptool to cover some issues.

Press S to select the stamp-tool. You can select a position that you'd like to copy when you hold the alt key and click the left mousebutton. When you leave the alt key, the cursor changes and you copy from the previously selected position.

Eventually it's easier and faster for you to correct parts like the beach and sky by overpainting it with color.

Color correction in Photoshop

As the photos that you shot mostly have a different temperature of colors as you remembered it to be or would like to have, you need to do some
color correction.

Standard tools I use for color correction are:

Curves -> Apple/ctrl M

Color/Saturation -> Apple/ctrl U

The curves are perfect for adding contrast to your photos and to add or substract nuances of colors.

You can add points on the curve by clicking onto the line and moving these points.

The steeper the curve, the more contrasty the picture gets. Working in the single channels helps seperating the colors.

I often add some warmth to my images by pulling up the red and green curve a bit and moving the blue one down a little bit.

The color/saturation tool is great, because it lets you move the whole variety of colors through your picture or changes just specific tones. Additionally you can give your images more power by rising saturation. But be careful with this.
Sometimes it‘s not accurate enough. In these cases try to use "selective colorcorrection" or the "channelmixer".

In the case of my tutorial panorama I adjusted just the bluetones to a more greenish blue to make it fit better to the sea.

This is, what I got out of the panorama in the end:

Click to view a bigger scrollable version of this panorama

I hope you enjoyed this little tutorial. Have fun creating your own panoramas.