Everyone’s had the frustrating experience of trying to photograph an awesome view—like a city skyline or a mountain range—only to find that it’s too wide to fit into one picture. Elements, once again, comes to the rescue. With the Photomerge command, you can stitch together a group of photos you shot while panning across the horizon to create a panorama that’s much larger than any single photo your camera can take. Panoramas can become addictive once you’ve tried them, and they’re a great way to get those wide, wide shots that are beyond the capability of your camera lens.
Elements includes the same great Photomerge feature that’s part of Photoshop, which makes it incredibly easy to create super panoramas. Not only that, but Adobe also gives you a few fun twists on Photomerge that are unique to Elements: Faces, which lets you easily move features from one face to another; Group Shot so you can replace folks in group photos; and Scene Cleaner, for those times when your almost-perfect vacation shot is spoiled by strangers walking into the frame. You also get Style Match, which lets you copy the overall look of one photo into another. Like the Ansel Adams-ish look you came up with for one of your images? With Style Match, you can just tell Elements to copy that onto a different photo.
Note
Elements includes one more kind of merge: Photomerge Exposure, which lets you blend differently exposed versions of the same scene (like photos taken using your camera’s exposure bracketing feature) to create one image that’s perfectly exposed from the deepest shadows to the brightest highlights. You can learn all about it on Blending Exposures.
Finally, if you’re into photographing buildings (especially tall ones), you know that you often need to do some perspective correcting because the building can appear to lean backward or sideways as a result of distortion caused by your camera’s lens. This chapter shows you how to use the Correct Camera Distortion filter to straighten things back up. You’ll also learn how to use the Transform commands to adjust or warp your images.
It’s incredibly simple to make panoramas in Elements. You just tell the program which photos to use, and Elements automatically stitches them together. Figure 11-1 shows what a great job it does.
Figure 11-1. With subjects like the Smoky Mountains, you can never capture the entire scene in one shot. Here’s a four-photo panorama made with Photomerge. The individual photos had big variations in exposure and were taken without a tripod. But Elements still managed to take the images—straight from the camera with no adjusting—and blend them seamlessly.
Elements can merge as many photos as you want to include in a panorama. The only real size limitation comes when you want to print your compositions. If you create a five-photo horizontal panorama but your paper is letter size, for example, your printout will only be a couple of inches high, even if you rotate the panorama to print lengthwise. However, if you’re a panorama addict, you can buy a special printer with attachments that let you print on rolls of paper, so that there’s no limit to the longest dimension of your panorama. You can also use an online printing service, like the Kodak Gallery, to get larger prints than you can make at home. (See Getting Ready to Print for more about ordering prints online.)
You’ll get the best panoramas if you plan ahead when shooting your photos. The pictures should be side by side, of course, and they should overlap each other by at least 30 percent. Also, you’ll minimize the biggest panorama problem—matching the color in your photos—if you make sure they all have identical exposures. While Elements can do a lot to blend exposures that don’t match well, for the best results, adjust your photos before you start creating a panorama. It helps to keep them side by side so you can compare them as you work. (See Image Views to learn how to arrange your photos on the Elements desktop.) The box on Shooting Tips for Good Merges has more tips for taking merge-ready shots. However, Elements has gotten pretty good at blending photos together even if they have somewhat different exposures, as you can see in Figure 11-2.
Figure 11-2. Even if there’s quite a difference in the color and exposures of your images, Elements can often do a fine job of combining them, as long as you turn on the Blend Images Together setting. Top: Here’s what you get with all the checkboxes in the Photomerge dialog box turned off. Not bad, but clearly stitched together. Bottom: With Blend Images Together turned on, Elements does a fine job of smoothing the transitions between the photos. This image also shows what happens to your image’s perspective if you turn on Geometric Distortion Correction (page 383).
When the photos you want to combine look good, you’re ready to create a panorama. Just follow these steps:
Start your merge.
Go to File→New→Photomerge Panorama. The Photomerge dialog box appears.
Choose your photos.
If the images you want to include are already open, click the Add Open Files button. Otherwise, in the Use drop-down menu, choose Files or Folder, and then click the Browse button to navigate to the photos you want. As you click them in the window that appears, Elements adds them to the list in the Photomerge dialog box. Add more files by clicking Browse again. To remove a file, click it in the dialog box’s list, and then click Remove.
Tip
You can merge directly from Raw files, although you don’t get any controls for adjusting the file conversions (but you may get a pretty good merge anyway). Photomerge works only with 8-bit files (Choosing bit depth: 8 or 16?), so if you have 16-bit files, Elements asks if you want to convert them when it begins merging. For faster Raw merges, set the Raw converter to 8 bits before you start.
From the Layout list on the left side of the dialog box, choose a merge style.
Ninety-nine percent of the time you’ll want to choose Auto, which works great in most cases; Elements takes care of everything, and usually produces a nice panorama. You also get some other choices for special situations:
Perspective. When you select this option, Elements adjusts the rest of the images to match the middle one (Elements figures out which image this is; you don’t need to do anything to indicate it) by using skewing and other Transform commands to create a realistic view.
Cylindrical. Sometimes when you adjust perspective, you create a panorama shaped like a giant bow tie (as in Figure 11-2, top). Cylindrical mapping (the method Elements uses to plan out the panorama) corrects this distortion. (It’s called “cylindrical” because it’s like looking at the label on a bottle: the middle part seems the largest, and the image gets smaller as it fades into the distance, like a label wrapping around the sides of a bottle.) You may want to use this style for really wide panoramas.
Spherical. Spherical aligns and transforms your images as if you were standing inside a globe and pasting them on the wall. This is a good choice if your source images cover more than 180º along the horizon. It’s similar to Cylindrical but also corrects distortion on the vertical axis, not just side to side.
Collage. If you choose this option, Elements rotates your photos, if needed, to get them to align perfectly, but doesn’t make any perspective changes to them. If you want to combine your photos exactly as they are, this is your best bet. Elements usually crops the completed panorama, though.
Reposition. Elements overlaps your photos and blends the exposures, but doesn’t make any changes to the perspective.
Interactive Layout. This option lets you position your images manually in a window that’s similar to the Photomerge window that was in early versions of Elements; the next section explains it in detail.
Choose how you want Elements to combine the images.
At the bottom of the Photomerge dialog box are three checkboxes that can make a big difference in the final panorama, as you can see from Figure 11-2. You can choose:
Blend Images Together. This tells Elements to smooth the transitions between your photos and blend the colors in the images. Leave this setting on unless you have a good reason to turn it off.
Vignette Removal. If you want to merge photos that have some vignetting (shadowy corners caused by things like your camera’s lens hood or the lens itself), turn this on and Elements will fix it while it merges the photos.
Geometric Distortion Correction. If you look at the first photo in Figure 11-2, it’s shaped like a big bow tie, a common outcome when stitching lots of images together. Turn this setting on, and Elements squares things up a bit, as you can see in the bottom image of Figure 11-2. However, you may not like the result; it’s totally up to you whether to turn this checkbox on.
Click OK to create your panorama.
Elements whirls into action, combining, adjusting, and looking for the most invisible places to put the seams until it whips up a completed panorama for you. That’s all there is to it.
Note
Elements has a lot of complex calculations to make when creating a panorama, especially if you’re combining lots of images or there are big exposure differences between the photos, so this step may take awhile. Don’t assume that Elements is stuck; it may just need a few minutes to finish working.
Tell Elements whether or not to fill in any empty edges in the completed panorama.
When Elements finishes combining your images, you see a dialog box asking if you’d like the program to automatically fill in the edges of the panorama to make it rectangular. Elements uses Content-Aware filling (The Spot Healing Brush: Fixing Small Areas) to do this, and sometimes you can get pretty amazing results.
However, this requires Elements to do a lot of serious thinking, and if there’s a lot of empty space in your panorama, you can expect your computer to slow to a crawl while Elements works. If your panorama is large, Elements may take many minutes to ponder it—and then announce that your computer doesn’t have enough memory, anyway. You’ll find that this feature works best if you also turn on Geometric Distortion Correction or use the Collage merge style so there’s less empty space to fill.
Note
Edge-filling creates a merged layer of all the photos and works on that, so your file size will be much larger if you use it.
You’ll probably want to crop your panorama, but otherwise, you’re all done (except for saving the completed file). You can do anything to your panorama that you can do to any other photo. The Recompose tool (Recomposing Photos) is especially useful for adjusting proportions in panoramas, if you need to do that.
Tip
Elements creates layered panoramas, and if you look at the Layers panel you can see layer masks showing how much of each photo it used. Since you know how to edit layer masks (Editing a layer mask), you can go back afterwards and manually make changes, if you want.
Tip
Elements always creates layered panoramas. So before you send your panorama out for printing, flatten it (Layer→Flatten Image), since most commercial printers don’t accept layered files. Also, if you enlarge the view of your layered panorama and zoom in on the seams, you may see what look like hairline cracks. Merging or flattening the layers gets rid of these cracks.
If you want to position your photos by hand, choose Interactive Layout from the Photomerge dialog box’s Layout list. When you click OK, Elements does its best to combine your photos, and then presents them to you in the window shown in Figure 11-3.
Figure 11-3. You don’t often need to intervene when Elements makes a panorama, but if you want to control the process yourself, Interactive Layout lets you position your photos by hand. Note how obvious the different exposures are here. Not to worry—Elements will blend your photos only after you click OK, so the final panorama won’t have this obvious exposure banding.
Your panorama in its current state appears in the large preview area, surrounded by special tools to help you get a better merge. On the window’s left side is a toolbox, and there are special controls down the right side. The lightbox across the top of the window contains any photos that Elements couldn’t figure out how to place.
You can use any combination of these features to improve your panorama. For example, you can manually drag files from the lightbox into the merged photos, and reposition photos already in your panorama. Just grab them with the Select Image tool (explained below), and then drag them to the correct spot in the merge.
If you try to nudge a photo into position and it keeps jumping away from where you place it, turn off the “Snap to Image” checkbox on the right side of the window. Then you should be able to put your photo exactly where you want it. Just remember that Elements isn’t doing the figuring for you anymore, so use the Zoom tool to get a good look at how you’re aligning things. You may need to micro-adjust the photo’s exact position.
Some of its tools at the top left of the window are familiar, and others are just for panoramas. From top to bottom they are:
Select Image. Use this tool to move individual photos into or out of your merged photo or to reposition them. When this tool is active, you can drag photos into or out of the lightbox. Press A or click the tool’s icon to activate it.
Rotate Image. Elements usually rotates images automatically when it merges them, but if it doesn’t or if it guesses wrong, press R to activate this tool, and then click the photo you want to rotate. Handles appear on the image, just like the ones you get with the regular Rotate commands. Simply grab a corner and turn the photo until it fits in properly. Usually, you don’t need to drastically change a photo’s orientation, but this tool helps you make small changes to line things up better.
Set Vanishing Point. To understand what this tool does, think of standing on a long, straight, country road and looking off into the distance. The point at which the two parallel lines of the road seem to converge and meet the horizon is called the vanishing point. This tool tells Elements where you want that point to be in your finished panorama. Knowing the vanishing point helps Elements figure out the correct perspective; Figure 11-4 shows how it can change your results. Press V to activate this tool.
Figure 11-4. You can radically alter the perspective of your panorama by selecting a vanishing point. Top: The result of clicking the center photo with the Set Vanishing Point tool. Bottom: The result of clicking the right-hand image. Note that the tool selects a whole image, not a specific point within a photo. You can click any photo to put your vanishing point there, but if you then try to tweak things by clicking a higher or lower point in the same photo, nothing happens. To change the vanishing point you’ve set, just click a different photo.
Zoom. This is the same Zoom tool you meet everywhere else in Elements. Click the magnifying glass icon in the toolbox or press Z to activate it.
Move View. You use this tool the way you use the Hand tool when you need to scoot your entire merged image around to see a different part of it. Click the hand icon in the toolbox or press H to activate it. (If you want to move just one photo within your panorama, use the Select Image tool instead.)
To control your onscreen view of the panorama, use the Navigator on the right side of the Photomerge window. It works just like the regular Navigator described on Changing the Size of an Image. Move the slider to resize the view of your panorama; drag it to the right to zoom in on an area, or to the left to shrink the view so you can see the whole thing at once. To target a particular spot in your merge, drag the red rectangle to control the area that’s onscreen.
Also, on the bottom and right side of the preview window are scroll bars and two arrows. Click an arrow to move in the direction the arrow points (so, for example, click the right-facing arrow at the bottom of the window to slide your image to the right). At certain view sizes you’ll also see a square (something like a checkbox) at the bottom and/or right side of the image. You can drag that like a handle to manipulate the view, too.
Below the Navigator box are two radio buttons that adjust the viewing angle of your panorama:
Reposition Only. This setting tells Elements to simply overlap the edges of your photos without changing the perspective. But if you don’t like the way the angles in your panorama look, try clicking Perspective instead. (Elements always blends the exposures of your images to make the transitions smooth; there’s no way to turn that off.)
Perspective. If you click this button, Elements tries to apply perspective to your panorama to make it look more realistic. Sometimes the program does a bang-up job, but usually you get better results if you help it out by setting a vanishing point. If you still get a weird result, go ahead and create the merge anyway, and then correct the perspective afterward using one of the Transform commands covered in the next section.
Once you like how your photos are arranged, click OK, and Elements creates your final panorama.