Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook

7.5. Stage 5

7.5.1. Overall retouching

How much retouching the picture that Panotools has assembled will need depends on how carefully the initial photos were taken. In this case, the middle looks too dark and saturated, and the seams are still visible.

Before

The image has layer masks, so it's easy to use Photoshop's Brush tool to make different parts of a layer appear and disappear.

It's also often necessary to correct contrast or exposure differences between pictures. The key is using adjustment layers on the layer masks to unify the whole panorama.

When you're satisfied with the result, flatten the image. This makes it easier to retouch any seams—such as the vertical bars in the sky—and to refine contrast and color balance corrections over the entire panorama, using adjustment layers and their layer masks.

After

Here I applied two Curves and Hue/Saturation adjustments to lighten the lower part of the picture. Each adjustment layer had a mask, so the upper part of the landscape wasn't affected.

Finally, save the panorama as a TIF file. You'll notice that retouching the extreme upper and lower parts of the picture is especially tricky when you get close to the edge of the frame. Don't bother spending too much time on them at this stage; we will deal with them later.