The Photoshop® CS Book for Digital Photographers

Stitching Panoramas Together

You don’t need a $500 stand-alone application to stitch together simple panoramas because you can do it in Photoshop. You can, however, make the process dramatically easier if you follow these two simple rules before you shoot your pano: (1) Use a tripod. That’s not to say you can’t shoot panos handheld, but the consistency a tripod brings to panos makes a world of difference when you try to stitch the photos together. And (2), when you shoot each segment, make sure that part of the next segment overlaps at least 15% of your previous segment (you’ll see why this is important in the tutorial).

Step One.

Open the first segment of your pano. The photo shown here is the first of three segments that we’ll be stitching ...