Have you ever thought about forming a panoramic image of your premises?

Many locations, companies, and events may ask for panoramic or 360 images, to show visually the location.

Panoramic photography is a technique of photography, using specialized equipment or software, that captures images with horizontally elongated fields of view. It is sometimes known as wide format photography.

This blog explains my own process attempt for forming a panoramic picture.

PROCESS

1st task.

While on location shoot repeated photographs from right to left in a horizontal line. This action works best with your camera on a stable tripod and makes sure that all images overlap.

See the photographs below as a visual example

2nd task

You have two options when editing the images together to form your panoramic photography. The two options are either using the editing program, Lightroom or Photoshop. The process I have used is through Lightroom.

Lightroom

This process is simple and easy to do, as this program will form the images for you.

1. Import your photographs taken from 1st task steps.

2. Select all images

3. Click on the Photo tab, then click Photo merge and click on Panorama

4. This will bring up a separate section that will align the images together. You can choose to click on these three ways to form the panoramic - Spherical, Cylindrical & Perspective. Try each one of these to see which makes your photograph look better. You can also auto-crop per picture and play with the boundary warp.

   Here is some information on using Auto crop & Boundary warp. You can decide between the two to use.

   If you click the Auto Crop checkbox, it will crop those white gap areas away after the panoramic process and the image will become smaller in size. You will lose some detail areas all the way around the image.

   If you move the Boundary Warp slider all the way to the right, and the image will warp itself brilliantly to expand into those white gaps, covering them, so you don’t have to crop down tight and lose important areas of your image.

5. Once you have made these decisions, Lightroom will form the panoramic picture.

Please see above an example of a panoramic photograph formed through Lightroom.

From looking at this image I have seen that the vertical lines are not upright and these seem unnatural. So I have tried the Photoshop process to see if this improves upon the horizontal lines in the images.

The other aspect I have tried is to build a panoramic image by building the image up in sections. See this step-by-step for how to form each section.

This process has worked better with these images and in future, this will be a clear way to build a well-proportioned photograph.

After playing with this process I have learnt these set things, to consider how each picture taken is shot in a straight line and consider curving the lines within each image. As you will see these curves in your end photograph if you don’t, please see above, the curved reception desk.

This is a practice that I will further develop to prevent curved lines or distortion after forming the images together.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions, all are welcome.