Photoshop Panorama

From an early age I can remember always wanting to “challenge” a new piece of knowledge once acquired.  For example, I recall coming home with a really cool “Indian spear” from the gift shop of one of our summer vacation stops.  It had a long bamboo shaft with a rubber spear tip attached.  Attached to the toy was a label exclaiming that bamboo was “unbreakable” so of course we had to challenge the new knowledge.  My younger brother and I ran off to our favorite rock pile fort where he was kind enough to take a few whacks at a boulder with my new treasure.  Turns out bamboo isn’t “unbreakable”. Lesson learned.

So, when I recently acquired Photoshop CS6, of course I had to try out the “Merge to Pano” option.  It was there wasn’t it?  During a recent fall photo outing, I took a series of 12 landscape orientated (portrait orientated images would have been better – another lesson learned) and ran straight home to the “rock pile” to see if I could “break it”.

Turns out it actually does work and so well that it’s nothing short of MAGIC!  When I took the photos I made sure to include about a 25% overlap from one frame to the next.  After offloading the images into Lightroom I selected the 12 shots, right-clicked and from the “Edit In…” context menu, selected “Merge to Panorama in Photoshop…”.  Photoshop launched, asked me a question about my preference for stitching the images together and then went to work.  I went to eat diner.  When I came back about 90 minutes later, there it was!  A rather awkward, but accurately stitched together, autumn panorama!

After reimporting to Lightroom I had to crop a little from the top and the bottom to remove white space, but there it was.  All 1.2 gigabytes of it!  I could zoom in to any portion of the image (wait… wait… wait…) and “WOW”, stunning detail like the deer grazing in the field.  It really is “unbreakable” (at least with this series of photos).

Anyone know where I can get a 3’ x 35’ frame?