Project development 2

Having transferred my images from the camera to the PC, I separated them into folders as set one, set two and set three. I will briefly describe the methods I used to stitch my images together to create a final panorama.

After starting Photoshop, we can use the "load files into stack" automation script to import a folder-full of images and have Photoshop place them on top of eachother on seperate layers. (The stack)

 

After Photoshop has imported our stack of images, it's time to lay them out side-by-side to ease the process of aligning them seamlessly. This requires you to expand the canvas, which can be done quickly by using the crop tool.

Now that the images are laid out, we need to lay them on top of eachother and align their 'edges', except the physical edges will be overlapping due to the way we shoot imperfectly on a tripod. This is why we change the opacity of the image we're planning to place on top, so that we can align any familiar artifacts with the image beneath.

The image above demonstrates the opacity changes needed to align an image with its parent, and in this example a warping transformation was used to fix a nuisance tree-line.

Once your images are aligned, including transformations, you can begin masking each of them for blending. This technique is used to remove the hard edges you get when overlapping images. Below is an image of the result on all three sets. (This was taken before full colour corrections were made.)

 

These now need to be 'corrected', cropped and resized for use in the stitcher!