My wife and I went to Crested Butte, Colorado, recently for spring break. We snowboarded for a few days and enjoyed the outdoors, taking a few photos along the way. One sure thing to do when enjoying the outdoors is to take panoramic shots. You don’t need a wide-angle lens to capture the vast expanse of outdoor landscapes photography. A technique I and many other photographers utilize is to take overlapping shots of a landscape and merge them later in Photoshop. Photoshop CS3 has a few new features and options to consider.

First, let’s go over some tips for when shooting these types of photos.

1. Hopefully, you’re using an SLR camera with an adjustable shutter speed and aperture. Don’t let the shutter speed and aperture change between shots; this would cause the resulting merged photo to not match up. Some parts of the resulting photo would have more exposure with a wider aperture and slower shutter speed. The depth of field would also differ with different aperture settings. So use manual mode, and remember what settings the shutter speed and aperture are set to and keep them the same for each shot.

2. Once you focus on the first photo, turn the lens to manual focus. This way, you control the focus of each shot, which should be the same for all of them.

3. Shoot the shots with the SLR camera held vertically, so more if covered at the top and bottom of the shot.

4. Be sure to overlap each shot about a quarter of the previous shot, so they overlap. We should avoid any blank areas in between obviously.

5. Before the first shot, take a photo of something unique, like your hand or snow glove in this case. After the last shot of the series, do that same thing. This way, you know which shot if the first in the panoramic series and which is the last, when you later browse the folder on your computer.
 
Step 1
Now let’s get started. For this example, I didn’t use my SLR camera, because I didn’t feel like lugging up the bigger Canon Rebel while snowboarding, especially since it’s more expensive than the one I brought, a Ccanon Powershot. I can put the Powershot in my pocket while snowboarding, so it was more convenient. But using an SLR is ideal for the reasons listed above. Go ahead and start up Photoshop CS3. Here’s there six images that we’ll be using from the support files.

Step 2
Go to File>Automate>Photomerge.

Step 3
A dialog will open that lists a few different options. “Auto” tells Photoshop to choose the best setting and apply it. It has less flexibility, but is quick and to the point. “Perspective” sets the image in a perspective that includes  less barrel distortion, while “Cylindrical” has more barrel distortion. “Reposition Only” simply does that—repositions the images but doesn’t change the perspective. “Interactive Layout” allows a few more options, so let’s choose that.

Step 4
Click Browse and select the images from the support files by clicking-and-dragging over them in the dialog. Click OK and the images will now be listed in the dialog. If we had already had the files open, they would already be listed there. Click OK to merge the photos.

Step 5
The Reposition Only option shows how the photos would look like if they were just copied and pasted next to each other.

Step 6
Clicking the Perspective option on the right adds perspective to the photo, rather than a “flat” look.

Step 7
The tools on the left side let you select and move the photos (the selection tool), move the view around (the move view tool), and the rotate and zoom tools let you rotate and zoom into the photos. The other one is the set vanishing point tool, which can be used when perspective is selected. Click somewhere to set the vanishing point. This example shows moving the vanishing point to the side of the photo.

Step 8
I pressed Ctrl-Z (Mac: Cmd-Z) to undo that tool. Select either perspective or reposition only and press OK to merge the photos.

Step 9
Notice how each layer is a partially-masked photo.

Step 10
Select the crop tool and crop out the empty pixels.

Using the photomerge tool is a great way to create breath-taking landscape photos. Here’s a few more examples.

1. Shoot about 30 minutes before and after sunset.
A sunset is a great thing to capture, but even if you’re not shooting the sunset but instead shooting at a 90-degree angle to the sunset or even shooting with the sunset at your back, having that subtle light brings out the colors in landscape photos. Most outdoor photography magazines won’t even consider shots that haven’t been shot around this time, as well as before/after sunrise.

2. Shoot about 30 minutes before and after sunrise.
As well as before and after sunset, shooting before and after sunrise causes a lot of detail and tone to be seen. The lighting avoids being overexposed, which happens many times when shooting in the middle of the day with harsh light. For portraits, you can shoot in the shade for subtle light even during the middle of the day, but with landscapes, you can’t put the entire landscape into the shade. You have to rely on the weather for that. You can shoot a little longer after sunrise if there’s some slight cloud cover, but usually an hour or two after sunrise and it’s already really bright.

This is an example of a slightly underexposed landscape photo. It’s not shot during the right amount of light, and was shot when the sun was too far down or with too much cloud cover.

3. Have a foreground, middleground, and background.
This is part of the rule of thirds, which I cover in the next tip. Make sure you have three elements in landscape shot in order to make it more aesthetically pleasing. For example, if there are some seagulls running on the beach along the shore, that can be the foreground, while the middleground would be the waves crashing and part of the ocean, and the distant ocean and horizon would be the background.

4. Use the rule of thirds.
The rule of thirds applies to landscape photography as well. Imagine drawing out a tic-tac-toe design, with two lines running vertically and two horizontally. The plane is divided into three equal parts. Try to put the subject where these lines meet; for example, to top left or top right or bottom left or bottom right.

In this photo, the umbrella is in the lower right corner.

The angles and placement of the two objects near the upper left corner work well here.

5. To include as much as the scenery possible, use a long depth of field.
Using a more closed aperture makes the depth of field longer (and the f-stop setting a higher number). This allows for more things to be in focus. While blurring out the background is sometimes preferred, with landscape photos, we often want to have many elements in focus.

In this photo, the camera focuses on the grass, but we want the depth of field to be high so we can see more of the landscape as well.

This is one example where we can see the detail of even elements far away.

6. Don’t put the horizon in the middle of the shot.
This tip is closely related to the rule of thirds tip: don’t put subjects (the subject being the horizon in this example) in the middle of the shot. While many beginning photographers may be inclined to divide the photo in half, having the horizon the top third, or even top fifth or top eighth, is much better, as is having the horizon in the bottom third, fifth, or eighth. This allows us to focus on either the sky or the ocean or earth so we have some kind of focus.

7. If the sun is harsh, shoot away from it to get blue skies. Shooting close to where the sun is causes the areas to be blown out.

This example of the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood shows how areas are blown out when shooting to close to the sun.

8. Finally, keep the horizon level.
This one may seem obvious, and although there are times when the horizon may need to not be level to accommodate a better composition of a subject, keeping the horizon level when possible is good practice.

This is one example where the horizon isn’t level. We’ll fix it in the next part of this article.

For a bonus addition to this feature article, here’s a short tutorial on making a horizon level.

1. Open an image with a horizon that’s not level. Instead of having to guess the angle to fix this at, here’s a short method that is lot more effective. You can use this image and save it to the computer and open in Photoshop. Download support file

2. Click-and-hold the Eyedropper tool to pull out the menu. Click on the Ruler tool.

3. Click-and-drag the Ruler tool along the crooked horizon.

4. Go to Image>Rotate Canvas>Arbitrary.

5. The degree of angle will be set to change the ruler to being level. Press OK.

6. Now we have some areas to crop out. Select the Crop tool.

7. Finally, we have a level horizon. We did change the composition though because areas had to be cropped out, so weigh the pros and cons before adjusting a horizon.