How to Create a Panoramic Photo in Adobe Camera Raw

[LukeLewis]

A popular project photographers frequently undertake is to create one panoramic photo of multiple shots they’ve taken. Perhaps they didn’t have a wide angle lens on hand or perhaps they wanted to capture a really, really large area. This is mostly used for landscape photography, but is becoming more and more popular with all types. For instance, the photo above is the center section of a wider picture. I merely cropped it for use in this post.

Today, I’ll be talking about how to create a panoramic photo using Adobe Camera Raw. As long as the pieces of the overall shot were taken using the same camera settings, it’s actually a very simple task.

Panoramic Pieces​

The photo I’m using for this post was originally wide. I cropped it into 5 overlapping pieces to demonstrate how Camera Raw can put them back together. I also created a graphic to show the pieces below.

Open Photos into Camera Raw​

I’m going to use Adobe Bridge to open the 5 photos at the same time into Camera Raw. If you have another method of opening your files, go ahead with that.



If you’re not familiar with opening multiple photos from Bridge into Camera Raw, you can check out my post on the topic:

How Can I Open Multiple Photos From Adobe Bridge Into Camera Raw?

Edit the Photos​

Chances are, the photos you want to put together as a panoramic aren’t edited yet. There’s a trick to this part, so be sure you follow it. When editing the pieces of a panoramic photo, you need to be sure to edit them all at the same time. This will ensure consistency across all the files. You certainly don’t want to edit one photo one way and another one another way. That would look odd after they’re placed together as one.

To edit all images simultaneously, I clicked the first one in the left column, held down the Shift key on my keyboard and then selected the last one. In the screenshot below, you can see they the thumbnails are now selected.



Once that was finished, I moved a few sliders around until the photos were to my liking.



Any change I made was applied to all files.

Merge to Panorama​

Once the editing is completed and you’re ready to merge all the photos together as one, you can click the icon at the top of the left Filmstrip panel. This will open a drop-down menu box. Roll over and select Merge to Panorama.



After that menu item is clicked, a Merge to Panorama Preview window will appear.



As you can see from the above screenshot, each of the 5 separate photos I originally opened have been analyzed and pasted together by Camera Raw. In my opinion, this is remarkable.

Now, if you look inside the preview window, you’ll see a few settings. The first is the Projection area and the next is the Options area. Inside the Projections area, you’ll want to click through each of the selections to see which makes your panoramic photo look the best. Camera Raw tries to adjust them based on how the photos were taken, so each instance will be different. Inside the Options area, you can see a choice for whether you want to auto crop the image or not. Basically, this option tells Camera Raw to find the innermost edge of the entire panoramic photo and crop up until that point. I don’t need to take advantage of this for the photos I used because they were clipped from the same image in an identical manner, but chances are, if you took multiple pictures of a landscape by hand, you’ll need the final file to be cropped. You can either let Camera Raw do it at this stage or you can do it manually later on.

Merge & Save​

To accept the panoramic file, I’ll click the Merge button in the Preview window. Then, after the Save window appears, I’ll name my file. I called it final-pano.dng. Camera Raw uses the DNG extension when saving out this type of file.



Behind the scenes, Camera Raw saved the file and also opened it in the application for further editing and saving as another file type or opening in Photoshop or a similar application. In the screenshot below, you can see the final panoramic at the bottom of the Filmstrip panel.



Since the that particular thumbnail is selected, the panoramic image is seen in the center panel.

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If you’ve enjoyed today’s post and found it helpful, please share it with a friend. Thanks!

 

[LukeLewis]

Creating a Panoramic Image of the White Mountains in New Hampshire​

My lady and I went for a long drive yesterday all the way to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Since we’re from Maine, the drive wasn’t tremendously long, but it was long enough. Anyway, the trip offered a cornucopia of photographic opportunities. I mean, really. If I lived nearer to the White Mountains, I’d never run out of things to take photos of. It’s beautiful and wonderful and everything in between, and all we did was drive through it. I can’t even imagine how many photos we would have taken if we had stopped along the way, more than we did.

We did make one stop early on. It was near the access road to climb Mount Washington (by car). There’s a parking lot right across the street that offered the view of a lifetime. I knew I had to pull over to grab some pictures and I’m glad I did.

There are tons of tips you can use when taking landscape photos. Some of them have to do with focus and others have to composition, while even others have to do with using the elements of the shots to your benefit. What I’d like to discuss today is how you can use the panoramic technology contained inside of Adobe Camera Raw to not only merge your multiple photos into one, but to keep those photos as high quality as possible. After all, you may want to print something as beautiful as what I’ll show you below and the more quality, the better.

When you’d like to take a really wide shot of a landscape, you always have the option of using a wide angle lens. I’ve done that in the past, but what I was left with was a very beautiful photo with not the best quality. Because of the distance and the sheer lack of ability of my camera to capture as much data as I’d like it to, the pixel count simply wasn’t up to snuff most of the time. It was because of this that I came up with the idea of merging three or more (or even two) high quality independent images to create a super image.

Let’s take a look at the original photos that I’ll be using for this post today.







I’ll keep those pictures as thumbnails, so they’re easier to see. You can click on them to make them larger if you want.

To merge these photos, I’ll be using Adobe Bridge along with Adobe Camera Raw. At the end, I’ll use Photoshop as well for some minor tweaks.

To start off, I’ll select all three images in Bridge. Then, I’ll click on the Open in Camera Raw button up top.





From there, all three photos will launch into Camera Raw.

Once the images are opened in Camera Raw, I’ll select all of them by clicking on the top one in the left column and then holding down the Shift key on my keyboard and clicking on the last one in the left column.



From here, I’ll click on the small menu that sits at the top of the column. Inside the menu, I’ll select the Merge to Panorama option.



If all the photographs are sequential and actually contain elements of each other in them, Camera Raw shouldn’t have any problems with merging them. It will take just a few seconds and when it’s all said and done, you’ll get something that looks like this:



Looks pretty good, right? So you may be asking, “Okay, why would I want that? It looks skinny and I could get that with my wide angle lens.” Well, I would answer that this composite measured more than 10,000 pixels wide, which means quality. It’s clear as a bell. A traditional photo would only give me around 5,000 pixels wide. Let’s see part of this image at 100% size.



That’s the top of Mount Washington. I’d say that’s pretty clear and it’s not something I would ever be able to capture at this quality with a wide angle lens alone.

So, my tip for today is, when taking landscape photos, consider using the panorama feature in either Adobe Camera Raw or Adobe Lightroom to maintain quality and to give some stunning images.

After merging the individual photos, Camera Raw will save the panorama as a unique file (DNG) and will store it, usually, in the same folder as the others came from. At that point, edits can be made in Camera Raw and then the file can be moved into Photoshop for sizing and further editing if necessary. Let’s take a look at the file image after I push some sliders around in Camera Raw and then crop the image to 800 pixels wide in Photoshop.



I removed a car that was on the road over at the right and that telescope that was showing in the left corner.

Do you have any further suggestions for a project like this? I’d love to hear about them. Thanks for reading!

 

[LukeLewis]

Pictures of Mount Washington & North Conway, New Hampshire​

I’m writing this post as an addition to my previous one on the topic. In my last post, I discussed how to go about creating a panoramic image using Adobe Camera Raw. Today, I’d simply like to show you a few photos of our trip to Mount Washington and North Conway, New Hampshire.

We visited this area in the autumn of 2018 and it was stunning. I’ve never quite seen anything like it. Mount Washington is a lot to take in and I thought it was pretty cool how there was already snow at the top of the mountain and it was only October. There was no snow on the ground. Also, North Conway is a great little town. Tons of tourists, but it wasn’t too crowded. I wouldn’t advise visiting on a weekend in the fall though. We went on a Monday and that was enough people for us. I can only imagine the sheer volume of humans on the weekends.

Enjoy the photos. I quickly pulled a few from my collection. These were decent, but I’ve got lots of others to share as well. Perhaps I’ll add to this thread in the future.