Panoramic Photography

Planet Pano


A fun "aerial" view style of Panoramic photo soch as the one above created by Annie Dubois
or the amazing Fisheye effect by Adele Ruhdorfer


stitch your panoramic image together in the usual way once you have you image cropped go to Image-Image size- unclick "constrain proportions" and enter the same size in the width box as you have for your height box.You should end up with a square image that looks very distorted. Next Flip your image upside down by going to Image- Rotate- 180
next go to Filters- Distort-Polar Coordinates- check Rectangular to Polar
Your end result should be a small distorted planet you will probably have to heal the edge where the 2 ends connect unless your pano is a perfect 360 degrees.





The 360 degree panoramic such as the photo of Paris by Jeff Schomays above,
http://jeff-schomays-portfolio.com/panoramic-artwork/360-panorama-photo-of-paris-france

has to be shot in a much more specific way. You are obliged to shoot with a tripod for greater accuracy. The photos should be shot with a fish-eye lens. Each shot should be 60 degrees from the last, making a panoramic head on your tripod essential.
60 degrees each, 360 degrees you should have 6 photos to work with,shooting vertically, as usual, to get the most area in your resulting image. Load your photos from Bridge into photomerge, Tools-Photoshop-Photomerge when the Photomerge dialogue box pops up in Photoshop all of your images should be listed check off the boxes to Remove Vignetting, Remove Geometric Distortionif necessary but always make sure that Blend Layers Together is checked. Once your photo is merged,flatten the layers.
crop the right and left hand side off at the edge of the photo. Do not crop in to the photo ,just remove the distorted ends go to the Filter menu choose Other-Offset make sure that Wrap Around is checked off. As you drag the horizontal slider you should see your image rotate in a circular fashion. you will see an area that doesn't fit properly into the scene. Using your rectangular marquee selection tool select this area. Go to your Layers menu-New Layer via copy using the move tool move your selection to the space that is fits into. You may have to blend these 2 layers together to make them fit better. Flatten your layers once you are satisfied and crop. Go back to Filters-Other-Offset and drag your horizontal slider from left to right. your image should rotate perfectly.

For a standard pano such as my photo of Sleive League above, the images were taken without a tripod. When shooting make sure that you do not move or drastically change the height of the camera.Plant your feet, each time you take a photo simply rotate around your axis. Also make sure that you are not using any auto exposure features. You'll end up spending lots of time working on your exposures just to try to make your images blend together well choose.Choose an exposure that is in between your brightest and darkest, the brightest more that likely being the sky and darkest some shadow areas in the foreground.You can take as many images as you need to you just need to make sure that all images are overlapping by between 35 and 40 percent.
in Bridge you can sync your images by loading all of you images together into Adobe Camera Raw -on the left hand side of the screen choose -Select all-Sync you will get a dialogue box asking what you want to sync. make your changes in exposure etc. go to lens correction use the remove vignette option as well as the lens correction option of necessary.
click done in the bottom right corner. From Bridge-Tools-Photoshop-Photomerge you will open you dialogue box make sure that- Blend all Images together- is checked.I usually use Auto but look at all the options to make sure that there isn't a better one. When photo merge is finished you csan flatten your image. If your horizon line isn't straight you could copy the background layer, then go to Edit-Free Transform (CMD+T) using the icon on the upper right of your screen you can stretch your image to align the horizon. You could also use Content Aware fill to fill in the corners instead of cropping them off.