How to take pictures for panoramas

Barbara Brundage has gathered some great tips for photographers who plan to use Photoshop Elements to create panoramas from their snapshots:

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The most important part of creating an impressive and plausible panorama starts before you even launch Elements.You can save yourself a lot of grief by planning ahead when shooting photos you want to combine.

Most of the time, you know before you shoot that you’ll want to merge your photos. (You don’t often say, “Wow, I can’t believe I’ve got seven photos of the SpongeBob SquarePants balloon at the Thanksgiving Day parade that just happen to be exactly in line and have a 30-percent overlap between each one! Guess I’ll try a merge.”)

So, before you take pictures for a panorama, set your camera to be as much in manual mode as possible. The biggest headache in panorama making is trying to get the exposure, color, brightness, and so on to blend seamlessly. (Elements is darned good at blending the outlines of the objects in your photos.) So lock your camera settings to make the exposure of each image as similar as possible. Even on small digital cameras that don’t have
much in the way of manual controls, you may have some kind of panorama setting, like Canon’s Stitch Assist mode, that does the same thing.

(Your camera may actually be able to make merges that are at least as good as what Elements can do, because the camera does the image-blending internally. Check out whether your model has a panorama feature.)

The more your photos overlap, the better. Elements does what it can with what you give it, but it’s really happy if about a third of each image overlaps with the next.

Use a tripod if you have one, and pan heads (tripod heads that let you swivel your camera in an absolutely straight line) were made for panoramas. Actually, as long as your shots aren’t wildly out of line, Elements can usually cope. But you may have to do quite a bit of cropping to get even edges on the finished result if you don’t use a tripod.

Whether you use a tripod or not, keep the camera--rather than the horizon--level to avoid distortion. In other words, focus your attention more on leveling the body of the camera than what you see through the viewfinder. Use the same focal length for each image, and try not to use the zoom, unless it’s manual, so that you can keep it exactly the same for every image.