Forgot to set your camera to panorama mode when you took the photo? No problem, you can stitch photos together in Photoshop. Actually, the steps to stitch photos are easy and Photoshop has a smart tool for stitching photos, but the key is photography.
I hope you took the photos in the same settings because one of the most important steps is to take a series of overlapping photos. Otherwise, the result might not be good.
Once you have your images ready, follow the steps below.
For example, I’ve taken these four beach images, but I want to combine them all in one to create a pano effect.
Note: the screenshots are taken from Adobe Photoshop CC Mac version. Windows or other versions can look different.
Step 1: Open Photoshop. Actually, you don’t have to create a new document. Simply go to the top menu File > Automate > Photomerge.
Step 2: Select the images you want to stitch together.
You can select the layout of the panorama effect you need on the left, but if you’re not sure, just select Auto. Click Browse to select the photos from your computer. Check the Blend Images Together option if it’s not automatically checked.
Click OK once you’ve uploaded the photos. It’s going to take a moment to process.
The effect is going to look like this. Pretty good. You can barely see the obvious stitch lines. See, that’s why I said photography is key. The four images I took are quite similar, just from different angles.
You might have to add a layer mask to fix the stitch lines if your photos’ similarities are less than 70%.
And you can see the stitches area from the Layers panel. They are shown in the layer masks.
Step 3: Use the Crop Tool (keyboard shortcut C) to crop the transparent border areas.
Step 4: Select all layers on the Layers panel, right-click, and choose Merge Layers.
All photo layers will merge into one layer and you’re all set. The reason to do this step is that it will be easier for you to edit the finished photo. You can add adjustment layers and layer styles to retouch, or any other effect you want to add to the image.
For example, the original image had some dark clouds.
I adjusted the color balance, lighting, and I used the Brush Tool with low opacity to brighten up the image.
Better?
Conclusion
This should be the easiest way to stitch photos together in Photoshop if you have high similarity photos. Otherwise, you’ll have to do some touch-ups on the stitch lines. So, again, taking a series of photos in the same settings is the most important step.
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