How I make my panoramic photos
In order to create seamless panoramic images, I need to do panoramic stitching from individual photos. The first step is to take proper photos that will be stitched into the final panorama. The amount of overlap, lens placement (causing parallax distortion), and exposure bracketing are all factors that make it easier or harder to do the panoramic stitching. Of course principle of photography and aesthetics must be applied, with the final panorama in in mind.
Once the photos have been properly taken, I import them all into my panorama stitching software. There are many kinds of panorama stitching software on the market, some free and some commercial. The one that I like the best is called Hugin. It is free and open source and quite advanced. The basic process is to align the photos by indicating overlapping areas, adjust for lens settings, set exposure settings, set optimization settings, then let the software do the panoramic alignment. I usually manually tweak a number of settings, but once it looks the way I want it I let the software stitch the panorama into one complete image.
Often, the final image is not ready for presentation. I almost always use a photo editing program like Photoshop to match the individual images up better and blend areas better, as well as crop the panorama how I want it. Sometimes I’ll do a limited degree of image editing, but most of the time I do not alter my original photographs much from the way I took them. I usually will do some post processing and image correction to smooth out any blemishes and make the image really pop.
Thanks for your interest! Contact me if you have any questions.
