Master panoramic pictures

Situations where I take one photo of a scene are becoming increasingly rare. Regular readers will know I’m a keen panographer and, unless you have some very specialised equipment, panoramic photography requires several overlapping images from which a super-wide angle composite is produced.

But digital technology has led to the emergence of all sorts of other applications for multiple images.

High Dynamic Range (HDR) images are produced from several shots of the same scene using bracketed exposures, object panoramas combine multiple shots of a rotated object to produce a virtual image in which it can be viewed from any angle, and Adobe Photoshop Elements has recently introduced a feature that lets you combine the best bits from several group photos.

So now everyone’s smiling, no-one has their eyes closed and if somebody wants to make horns with their fingers behind somebody else’s head, they need to be pretty persistent.

In this month’s column I thought it would be interesting to look at, albeit briefly, some ways you can make one great image out of several, well, not so great ones. I’ve covered some of these techniques in more detail in earlier columns, but if there’s anything you’d like me to go into in greater depth in a future Hands On drop me an email and let me know.

Panoramas
There are two ways to produce panoramic images, the quick way and the slow way.
If you opt for the quick way you hand-hold the camera and take a few overlapping shots, then use the panoramic stitching feature in your image editor to create a seamless panorama.

Fewer photo-editing applications now seem to support panoramic stitching, but Photoshop Elements 7 does a superb job of it.

The slow way requires a special panoramic camera head, costing from around £400 upwards, that rotates the camera without introducing parallax errors.

You will also need specialised stitching software, such as Autodesk Stitcher or one of the Panotools-based GUIs such as Hugin.

It’s more expensive, and requires more skill, experience and effort than the quick way. You can, however, produce flawless 360° interactive virtual reality images using Quicktime or Flash-based panorama players.