Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
[Learn] [The How To series from Adobe]
[video2brain] [World-Class Training]
[This video is part of Adobe Photoshop Elements 9: Learn by Video]
[Available on learnbyvideo.com and video2brain.com]
[Male] We tend to look at the world not as being comprised of individual rectangular frames,
but rather as sweeping vistas.
This tends to be more important for subjects that span across a wide horizon,
but using a panoramic format can also provide an excellent
creative interpretation of a variety of subjects.
While a panoramic image could be created from any photo by simply cropping it,
you'll get the best results with the largest potential output size
by assembling multiple frames into a final composite image.
In this lesson, I'll show you how to create just such an image.
When you're capturing a composite image in the first place,
you'll want to set the camera to the manual exposure mode
and use settings that are appropriate for the full range of the scene
you're going to photograph.
You'll also want to use a tripod and make sure that that tripod
and therefore the camera are perfectly level.
Check the camera with a bubble level to make sure that it is level
through the full sweep of your panorama.
Once you've captured the images, you're ready to put them together in Elements.
Now, here I have images in the Organizer, but I'm going to switch
to the Editor really quick just to show you that we can also utilize
the panorama feature directly from within Elements.
Simply choose File, New, and then Photomerge Panorama.
This will bring up the Photomerge dialog where we can assemble our panorama.
The trouble is then we would need to browse to go find the images
or have already opened the images in the Elements Editor
and used those as the images to be processed with Photomerge.
In my mind, it's much easier to locate and select the images in the Organizer first,
and then access the Photomerge feature from there.
So, I'll click "Cancel" here, and then switch back to the Organizer
and select the images that I would like to include in my panorama.
I'll just click on the first image and then hold the Shift key and click on the last image.
I'll then choose File, New, Photomerge Panorama.
This will open all of these images in the Editor and then bring up the Photomerge dialog.
Then all I need to do is click the "Add Open Files" button,
and the images I had selected in the Organizer
will be added to the list of images to be assembled in Photomerge.
All I need to do at that point is configure the settings as desired.
On the left side we can choose Layout,
which relates to the type of panorama we're assembling.
This could be a perspective panorama, which is when you're standing in one place
and turning the camera to capture multiple images,
or cylindrical, where you're moving around a subject, such as a building,
in order to assemble the multiple images for the panorama,
or a variety of other panoramic options.
I actually always leave the option set to auto,
and I'm consistently impressed with Elements ability to assemble the images properly.
We definitely want to turn on the Blend Images Together check box
so the images will actually be blended into a final panorama.
If you're concerned about vignetting or geometric distortion
in your original captures, you can also turn on these additional check boxes
so that that processing will be performed.
In this case, I'm not worried about vignetting because I was using a long lens
that doesn't exhibit any vignetting, and because of that long lens,
there was really no geometric distortion in the images.
At this point, I can simply click "Okay" and the panorama will be assembled by elements.
Each of these images will be processed and compared
so that it can align all of the frames in the individual panorama
and assemble them together, align them, and then merge them
so that they are blended into a final seamless image.
When the assembly of your panorama is complete, you'll be asked if you'd like to
fill in the edges.
In this case, for example, you can see that the edges bow upward
based on my perspective relative to the subject, and so I could fill in those outer areas.
The only time I would actually use the option to fill those areas
is if they were very consistent.
For example, a clean, open blue sky, which is not the case here.
So in this case, I'll click "No," but then I will apply a crop to finalize the image.
When applying this crop, make sure that all edges of the crop
fall inside the actual image area.
When everything looks good, simply apply that crop and your image is finalized.
Keep in mind, by the way, that sometimes the image you see
when it is zoomed out will look like there are areas that have seams in them.
But if you zoom in, you'll discover that those seams actually don't exist at all.
It's just part of the way the image is being presented within Elements.
A panoramic image can often provide a much more interactive experience for the viewer.
It provides them with the opportunity to explore the image horizontally
just as we might scan along the horizon when standing before a scene.
Thanks to the Photomerge feature in Elements, the process of creating such an image
is quite simple.
