Panorama in Photoshop

In my last post I talked about the lesson I learned using my new Nikon D610 to take pictures of the Superstition Mountains east of Phoenix, AZ. I thought I'd say a bit about what I did with them once I got them...
 

Panorama images are BIG

 

Panorama of the West Face of the Superstition Mountains

A panorama image, in Photoshop and other photography terms, as well as my own, is a picture that is comprised of a number of smaller pictures that have been (hopefully) seamlessly combined to make the one big picture.
 
Panorama images allow you to create a final image that is larger than one single image can be with a given set of equipment. I was using a 50mm prime lens - a lens that is a single length (it doesn't allow you to zoom in or out). In order to control how much of the subject fills up the frame you have to physically move the camera closer or farther away from the subject.
 
I was kind of stuck with the Superstitions pictures.
 
I could have got closer, but not without walking closer to the mountain and I didn't like the looks of things where we were. There were a lot of boulders with holes around them, exactly the kind of thing you know isn't done by accident. I'm guessing they were all snake holes because they didn't have any web around them like a tarantula would make. I might have been okay but I couldn't carry my dog and the camera and tripod and I was worried that my dog might step in a hole and get a nasty surprise. Besides, the mountain already filled up my frame well as you can see. It's not crowded on the right side top, but I wouldn't really want to crop out any more sky.
 
I couldn't back up any farther to get the whole thing in one shot or I'd start getting houses in the picture. Yes, there are houses that close.
 
So, I was at a good distance (maybe 300 yards from the cliffs).
 
A wide angle lens, perhaps even a 24mm, might have got the shot. But, I knew I could take three shots and combine them.
 

Bigness Part Two

 
These pictures are also big in the sense that they are made up, in this case, of three pictures. I shoot in RAW, and each of these pictures is around 23M. Adding them together makes the resulting picture around 60M (some of the individual areas are removed where the separate images are stitched together - you don't need two sets of data in the image file for the overlapping area). My computer starts slowing down and I've got 8G of RAM with a quad core 2.6GHz CPU.
 
Fortunately Adobe Photoshop CC 2014 can work directly in RAW instead of TIFF so the file sizes were kept at the minimum size possible. TIFF files are usually significantly larger than RAW files.
 

Shooting and Processing the Bigs

 
For my panorama of the Superstitions shown here, I used Adobe Photoshop CC 2014 to combine three smaller pictures into the one larger picture. If you look at my online gallery you can even download the full size image (it might take a while download and display, it's a 19M jpeg!), and you can see the three individual pictures I combined to make this one.
 
The trick to shooting panoramas, or "panos", is to make sure that your exposure and focus are in a manual mode so that the individual pictures can be combined more easily and will look the same across the resulting image. That was the somewhat tricky part I had because of my unknowingly using the bracketing feature while I was shooting the pictures.
 
You also likely want to use a tripod and a head with a pan feature like my Manfrotto 468MG. This does two things - gives you a good stable foundation for taking the pictures and allows you smoothly pan from side to side while keeping the camera level and in the same plane.
 
First, by looking through the view finder and panning, I noticed that I could get the face of the Superstitions in 3 images. For example, I composes the left shot so that I got all of the cliff transition to the alluvial fan. Without moving the camera, I noticed a landmark on the right side of the shot. I rotated the camera to the right until the landmark was near the left edge of the viewfinder (did I mention how nice the large viewfinder is on the Nikon D610?). Again, I picked out a landmark on the right side of the viewfinder. And again I rotated the camera until the second landmark was near the left side of the viewfinder, and saw that the edge of the cliff was within the frame.
 
I set up for the shot by ensuring my ball head was level. In my case I have a spirit level built in to the tripod (the Manfrotto 055XPROB). When it's level, the head is level as long as the center pole is in the vertical position.
 
Next, I verified the ball of the ball-head and the camera itself was level. I was able to use the Virtual Horizon feature of the Setup Menu. That thing is slick - easier for me than the bubble level I have (at least it was in the not so bright light). With the tripod, ball-head, and camera levelled, I could shoot the three images as before when I verified I could get them in 3 shots.
 
You don't want to re-focus or change the exposure for the 3 shots either. To help this, make sure the camera is in manual mode, and if I use auto focus I'll take it off auto prior to taking the shots. This, of course, assumes the subject is at the same distance in all of the shots.
 
For processing, you want to make sure you have overlap between the pictures so the software can line them up. I found it interesting that Photoshop did NOT just create a straight line to line the images up, it created a jagged line which helps hide the seam. Cool!
 
I processed the 3 shots into a pano, cropped it as large as possible to eliminate the curved overall image, and got the shot above!