Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook

1.3. Stage 3

1.3.1. Assembling the images

I planned to assemble the four images in Photoshop starting with the image on the right, so I opened picture 4. You'll notice that I placed Photoshop's tools outside of the canvas so that they wouldn't interfere with the image, while keeping all of the menus displayed.

Photoshop's tools have been moved outside of the canvas.

Each photograph produced by the Canon EOS 1Ds was 9 × 13.5 in. (22.89 × 34.41 cm) at 300 dpi. I opened picture 4, then resized the canvas using Image→Canvas Size to 36 in. (92 cm) wide (four times the width of the photos) and 15.7 in. (40 cm) high. In the same dialog box, I clicked the center-right arrow (in the 3 o'clock position) and then clicked OK.

I then opened picture 3, selected it (Ctrl-A), and dragged it onto picture 4 with the Move tool; this created a new layer (Layer 1). I repeated the same operations for pictures 2 and 1.

The perspective in picture 3 was distorted when I tipped the camera up, so I had to straighten the two curtains of ice on either side of the mountain to make them perfectly vertical, as in the other pictures.

In Layer 1 (which held picture 3), I pressed Ctrl-T to summon the Free Transform function, and, while holding the Ctrl key down, pulled the upper corners up and out to warp the picture and straighten the perspective. I then moved the whole photo up a bit.

For a photograph to be as realistic as possible,

everything depends on the subtlety of your manipulations.

I set Layer 1 in Multiply ...