How to Create Big Panoramas in Photoshop

In this tutorial you will learn how to create panoramas that are big and with a different perspective and not the usual narrow and long ones, these work best with buildings and objects that otherwise would look small in a normal panorama photo, starting from how to shoot them down to how to stitch them together and how to make Photoshop work faster.

We will create a panorama that is shot with the camera being positioned vertically, for this you need any camera, preferably something that can shoot in Camera Raw, Adobe Photoshop CS 6 or any other version will do and Adobe Lightroom, I will show you what I do when the photos are taken, how to take them and how to increase performance in Photoshop by letting it use most of your RAM and how to prepare them in Lightroom for hassle free stitching in Photoshop.

 Tutorial Resources

• Panorama Sample Images

Step 1

First of all you need to take your camera, go outside and find a place you would like to take a photo of, lets start with finding a big building that just would not look good if you take 1 photo of it. I stumbled upon The Royal Pavillion on my visit to Brighton, to take photos of it I pointed my camera at the centre of the building, the camera was positioned sideways (as if to take a portrait photo) I have canon 600d with a 14mm lens but any will do, when you aim at the centre of th building go as close as you can so that there is almost nothing else in the frame apart from the photo, but do leave a bit of ground and sky un the top and bottom of the image to allow cropping at a later stage (see the image) this will be your centre image. (image 1)

Step 2

Standing where you are after taking your first photo turn slightly to your right and take the next shot keeping the camera at the same level and so that the next shot overlaps about 40% of the first one and continue shooting until your last shot has around 40% of the building in and the rest is of whatever background there is, this is to allow cropping, do this in both directions but make sure you centre your first shot correctly and do not tilt the camera or it will go wrong at the end like the wonky roof in the third image below. Now that you have all your shots you can go home and import them into Adobe Lightroom.

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