Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook

3.5. Stage 5

3.5.1. Positioning the layers

Having scanned the photos from my shoot, I chose the eight pictures that would comprise the background, and imported them in layers. When I lined them up, I was happy to see that they matched almost perfectly, top to bottom. If a shot had been too high or slightly tilted, I could have pulled it down or rotated it, but that would mean a transformation, degrading the quality of the image still more. As you modify a picture, the degradation adds up and the differences, compared to unchanged areas, are visible on a large printout. So I tried not to make too many manipulations.

The panorama now looked unbalanced; it was too long on the right, and instead of a curve, I had a series of facets. Hmmm—what if I drew the sea as if it were an enormous diamond? Well … maybe some other time.

For starters, the four shots on the right had to be trimmed, so I squeezed them together by increasing their overlap. I added an empty layer mask to each layer. Now I had to choose the right place to cut between the layers. Using the Rectangular Marquee, I isolated the excess edge of one of the layers. I filled the selection with black, which caused the layer to disappear in that area, allowing the layer underneath to show through. (You can't see this in the illustration because the mask appears in red.)

Warning! I was careful to click on the layer mask thumbnail so I would be affecting only the mask. The border wasn't cut, only masked. Later, to refine the merger, ...