Photoshop's Photomerge, Pt. 1

Photoshop has a great feature, called Photomerge, that was originally designed to stitch together photos to make panoramic images.

In this first part, I'll show how to use this feature to create a panorama from three photos. In a following post, I'll demonstrate how I usually use Photomerge: To piece together an illustration that I had to scan in sections.

To get started, I took three photos of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, IL (this building was part of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893). I didn't use a tripod and I left the camera on "auto exposure," so the exposure shifted a little bit for each shot. I left some overlap between the shots.

I opened the photos in Photoshop and went to File > Automate > Photomerge.

I'm going to show the effects of three different settings. For the first one, I'm not going to use any of the blending features to contrast with the next two in which I let Photomerge work its magic. See A below for the settings and B for the result.

A I'm going to choose Reposition Only, uncheck Blend Images Together,
and Add Open Files.

B This shows the result of merging the three photos, using Reposition Only and
none of the blending features. Click to enlarge.

Now, let's use Layout > Auto and check the Blend Images Together option:

The blending looks good, but Photoshop has distorted the image to
correct for the perspective. Click to enlarge.

This Layer Panel screen shot shows how Photoshop is skewing
the individual photos and using Layer Masks to help in the
merging of the photos.

This last one shows the Blending, but I've also checked the box for Geometric Distortion Correction (found under the Blend Images Together option):

I used Layout > Auto, checked Blend Images Together and
Geometric Distortion Correction.

So, there you have it. After some cropping you'll have a blended panoramic image. Next up: Using Photomerge for piecing together scans.