Photoshop Elements 3: The Missing Manual

Chapter 10. Creating Panoramas and Transforming Images

Everyone's had the experience of trying to photograph an awesome view—a city skyline or a mountain range, for instance—only to find the whole scene won't fit into one picture, because it's just too wide. Elements, once again, comes to the rescue. With Elements' Photomerge command, you can split any extremely wide view up into several photos and then stitch your pictures together into a panorama that's much larger than any single photo your camera can take. Panoramas can become addicting once you've tried them, and they're a great way to get those wide, wide shots that are beyond the capability of your camera lens.

The general procedure for creating a panorama in Elements is pretty straightforward, but the devil is in the details. In the first part of this chapter, you'll learn how to use the Photomerge command to make panoramas. Since the angle of your image may need a little correcting afterwards, you'll also learn how to use the Elements Transform commands to adjust the images you've created.

You can use Transform in many other situations, too. If you're into photographing buildings (especially tall ones), you'll know that you often you need some kind of perspective correction: a building appears to be leaning backward or sideways because of distortion caused by your camera's lens. The Transform commands are great for straightening things back up.

Note

Photomerge is great for making larger images by combining photos at their ...