Sewing pictures together in PS

[mjs1973]

I took a bunch of shots of a Little Arbor Vita Lake while on vacation last week with the thought of sewing them together to make 1 panaramic shot of the lake. Any good tips on how to get each picture to blend together too look like 1 photo instead of 12? Getting them to line up was pretty easy, and getting the colors in the trees to blend isn't too bad, but the water and the sky is driving me nuts do to some shots being lighter and others being considerably darker. Any suggestions of tips that I could use to get this to work without spending the entire weekend adjusting every pixel??? I have attached what I have done so far, which isn't much, as a referance. Any suggestions, as always, are greatly appreciated.

Mike

[Peter_AUS]

Have you tried to white balance them at all. Certainly the colours are all over the place from the little that I can see here with small images.

[wburychka]

I'm just guessing, but it looks like you missed one of the first rules for panoramas--lock the exposure. You meter for the brightest portion of the panorama and then hold that exposure for all the sections. Some P&S cameras do that for you when you set them for panorama--that is, the exposure from the first pic is locked for the others. If your camera has a manual setting, you can use that.

If that is what happened, you may just need to lighten or darken some of the pics to bring them to the same level. Of course, if you live near where you took the pic, you can just go back and re shoot. If you do reshoot, some other panorama guidelines--shoot with the camera vertical for less distortion and light falloff near the edges, level the tripod head before you start, and be sure to overlap enough that you have matching landmarks in adjacent pics. If you can set the WB in addition to locking the exposure and focus, then do that too.

A great little tool for creating the panorama is Photostitch--the program that comes bundled with most Canon cameras and scanners. It will not work with a lens taking an angle of view wider than 75 degrees, though (that's a 28mm on a full frame 35, or equivalent).

[pildo]

What is this picture?

[mjs1973]

http://webpages.charter.net/mjs1973

I think I got it figured out Pildo.

Michael

What is this picture?

[hellinvader]

if you have PS CS, u can try the match colour function. and blending them u can select the overlap area between pictures, feather it (PC: ctrl+alt+D Mac: apple key+alt+D) , and delete it, so u get a smoother transaction between photos.