Having fun with panoramics…

One of the things I played around with on this last trip was taking panoramic photos.  Actually, they’re separate photos taken in a row and then stitched together with a software program…mine being Photoshop CS5.  If your camera has this feature, you take a picture in the stitch mode, turn a little, take another one…and so on.  Then the software program does most of the work stitching them together.  As you can probably guess, the more pictures you put together, the skinnier and longer the end product gets.  For example, this photo was only two shots.  (You can click on it to get the full effect.)


I actually took four pictures of this scene, but for some reason, Photoshop did NOT want to stitch them all together, so I settled for two.

This one is three photos…

This one is two…

This one is four.  As you can see, the more photos you take, the less you capture in detail.  But it’s still a cool effect.

You can also notice that it distorts things a little and/or puts things on a slight slant.

I kind of like how the zocalo turned out.

So, when you stitch these photos together, this can be the result.  It pulls them together in a way that it thinks it should look, with a lot of white space where things don’t line up.  Normally, you would have to crop inside the photo to get rid of the white space which would make it really long and skinny.

But Photoshop CS5 has a feature that fills in that white area with what’s called “content aware” in which it takes neighboring pixels and figures out how to match them to complete the photo.  Amazing.  You usually have to fix a few flaws, but it’s incredible how accurate it is.

Although sometimes it does get confused.  I was standing at the end of this pier when I took this series of photos.  For some reason, Photoshop decided the pier should end about 20 feet in front of me.  Haha!  Oh, well…still kind of a neat effect.

Now that I’m back, I can think of all the other panoramics I could have taken…like at Punta Sur or along Garrafon.  Well, I guess I’ll just have to go back.