24mm Panoramic with CS5

When I was teaching a workshop in St. Augustine a few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to photograph a church early in the morning with a group of students. I had learned that Photomerge in Photoshop CS5 was able to put together a panoramic using a wide angle lens. Before CS5 you had to use either a normal or telephoto lens to produce a good panoramic images with Photomerge. This was usually fine as I would turn my camera vertical and take as many photographs as needed and then merge them together. But this time I was up very close to the church and even with turning my camera vertical I was not going to be able to photograph it using a normal lens, so I put on my 24mm lens and shoot this group of photos.

I wasn’t content with just trying to put together an image with wide-angle lenses. I decided I had to do it in HDR. So I took all these images and converted them to HDR using both Photoshop’s new HDR Pro and Photomatix Pro. In Lightroom I selected the eight converted HDR images and ran Photomerge to create this one image, and I was really surprised at how well it put them together.

Here are the eight images that were used in photo merge to create the one image on the bottom, I had to crop a little bit and use a little bit of Content Aware Fill, but in the end I really liked how this image turned out.

Keep an eye out in the video tutorial section later this month for a video on how to do this.