Had a chance to shoot in Seattle this afternoon and thought I’d try shooting some panorama’s. This is 12 images stitched together with a hand held shot at 18 mm on a wide angle Nikon lens. Shutter was at 1/180 with an F6.7 aperture.

When shooting a shot like this with the intention of stitching together, it is important to make sure you are set on manual mode for shutter and aperture. Since I mostly shoot aperture mode, I took a test shot and then read the settings and then moved my camera to manual mode. If I was to do this over, I would have probably shot 24 photos to make sure the lower part of the marina made it into the image.  The aluminum boat in the center was in my initial shots, but you have to crop about a 1/3 of your final results to get a panorama as the stitching is not aligned with the way the frames were shot. I also overlap about 1/3 of the frame to the next, to make sure I don’t miss any details.

Below is one of the original images, flat and boring, so you can see why I needed to add some tweaks.

In Photoshop CS2-CS4, this is real easy to create. Go to File>Automate>Photomerge and choose all the images you want to create the panorama. Click Ok and PS will do the rest. Once I cropped, I then did a few things to get rid of the muted tones as the light was real flat. I created another layer and ran Filter>Other>High Pass. I then set opacity to 30% and fill to 25% with a color dodge screen. This brings out a bit more of the detail in the image. Bumping up the saturation a bit to bring out the color, completed the image.