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Welcome to the to the TDMD daily tip Podcast, my name is Marcelo Lewin, the media digital theater. Today’s tip is for Photoshop CS3 in how to create a panoramic photograph.

I’d like to start this podcast with a secret and please lets just keep it between us, but every time I show people a panoramic photograph that I shot, they think I’m the smartest and best photographer that they have ever met, so please don’t tell anyone about these episodes because I like to keep them thinking that.

However, after you watch this broadcast, you’ll probably say “you know what Marcelo, you aren’t that smart, and in fact it’s really the Photoshop CS3 that’s making you look smart”.

Well that’s true but no one really needs to know that. Also as a FYI in this broadcast, I won’t cover how to shoot the photograph since there are some basic rules you need to follow so that this trick I’m about to show you will work perfectly every time.

I’ll show you how to shoot the photographs in future episodes, so lets do it, let’s create a pano-photograph.

Okay, here we are in Photoshop, and as you can see I already opened up four of the photographs that I’ve shot, they were consecutive shots to build my panoramic photograph, now this were shot using the raw format but basically you can build a pano-photograph either than a kind of format JPEG, GIF, PNG whatever you have.

Now the first step to create your photograph is to pick any photograph, it doesn’t matter which one you pick, it doesn’t have to be the first one you shot, the middle one or the last one, just pick any of the photographs you shot, and go ahead and make a duplicate of that photograph. Go to image, duplicate, so that you’re not messing around with your photograph that is the original photograph.

Once you made the duplicate of it, go to your layers, double click on it so you can turn your background into an actual layer. Now we’ll keep this aside, and we can go ahead and close the one which is duplicated, and close that photograph, and I’m not going to save, don’t save.

Now I’m gong to the next photograph, what I’m going to do a control A to select and then a control X, so I know I copied it. And then, I’m going to ahead and paste it into the photograph that had the first layer. I’m going to go ahead and close this photograph, I’m going to say “don’t save”, I’m going to my next photograph, again control A which selects everything, control X which basically cuts it, and then I’m going to go back again to the same photograph that I was working on control D, it adds another layer, I’m going ahead and close this, and then I’m going to go ahead in my last photograph, control A, control X, I’m going to go ahead in control V, and then put my another layer there, I’m going to go ahead and close the last one and I say “don’t save”.

Now I have the duplicate photograph with all of the photographs I’ve shot in one in each layer, and that’s the key here, we need to that, now if we have for example 10 photographs you shot consecutively to build your pano, then you would have 10 layers, once you did that then we can move on to create the actual pano shot.

Okay, now here comes the real hard part, I’m just kidding, it is not actually hard, it’s very easy. The key here to build in your pano shot is you need to select all your layers, so we go to the layers here, and we shift, we click the first layer, the top most layer, then we hold the shift key, click the bottom layer and that will select all your layers. Then you need to go the edit menu, then you go to auto align layers, you’ll get a pop up, you leave in auto automatically, you click on okay, Photoshop will start doing its thing, it will analyze each layer and will stitch them all together, then you will get your brand new pano shot.

Now, of course this is not properly fixed, as you can see, you can see some overlaying of different layers here. The next step once you’ve done that is you need to go again to edit, and gain make sure that your layers are all selected still. Go to edit, auto blend layers, and photo shot will start doing the blending of all the layers so they come out smooth and looking really good.

Okay, there you go, Photoshop has just blended the layers, so as you can see here, we have all the layers blended, and we have the full pano shot, of course we are not fully done now, we still need to strain the photograph if it needs it, and then we need to crop it, so what I’m going to do is I’m going ahead and crop it right now, and I’m going to select as much as possible without getting any extra spaces, so I’m going to take the crop down a bit there, a bit there, and move this over, and I think that that cover is just about everything. I’m going to hit enter, and now I have my actual pano shot that covers from left to right of the entire seen. And if I’m going to zoom in so you can see, you can see that it looks pretty good, of course I didn’t fix the actual photograph, the levels and things like that, you can go ahead and move forward and do those kind of things but in general there you have a nice pano shot, and what you going to do now is share this pano photograph using the zoomify tool which I covered in tip number 15, so watch that if you haven’t watch it.

So I told you this wasn’t going to be that hard. It is a very powerful tool within Photoshop CS3, and I’m sure all of you will have a lot of fun playing the auto align and auto blend feature of Photoshop.

Well that’s it for now, I hope you enjoy this broadcast, I love to here from you, if you have a moment please e mail me at marcelo@thedigitalmediadude.com. So until the next podcast, this is Marcelo Lewin, the digital media dude. Cheers.