Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook

3.4. Stage 4

3.4.1. The components of the image

Many things were missing from the eight background photographs and would be brought in from other pictures. But even that wouldn't be enough; I had to re-shoot some pictures more than once to catch windsurfers in distinctive and interesting positions. If you must do this, don't change your shooting position. Later, you can roughly select parts of other pictures with the Lasso and bring them in as layers with some of their own background. If your shooting position hasn't moved, those backgrounds will be similar and much easier to blend in.

To simplify retouching the seams, I also took a few pictures of large areas of water and sand in the foreground. Later, I could put them directly over problematic areas.

I did the same thing with the waves. Importing them whole would spare me the trouble of fixing other waves that had been chopped off.

These pictures were taken with the same exposure settings as the earlier ones, and, of course, during the same shooting session. Therefore, I had to hurry. If the wind had died, the waves wouldn't have looked the same. Light changes quickly. The eye doesn't perceive it, but two photographs taken an hour apart look very different. It's possible to play with these variations, but I didn't want to—my goal here was a panorama that was as realistic as possible.