- [Deke] Now,

one way to stitch a bunch of photographs together

is to go up to the file menu, choose automate,

and then choose this guy right here, photomerge.

And then notice that initially,

we don't actually have any files to work from,

and so to load up the base photos,

you need to click on the browse button

and then click on one

and shift click on the last one like so,

and then click OK

in order to load up a list of all those files,

and then I'd click OK inside of this dialog box

in order to let her rip.

However, I'm going to show you my preferred way of working

by canceling out here,

and then I'll go up to the file menu

and choose Browse in Bridge,

which will go ahead and launch

the independent Adobe Bridge application,

assuming that you've installed it.

All right now here,

we're seeing all those quarter sized JPEG files.

And so notice that each one of them measures

1824 pixels wide

by 2736 tall.

If you want to work from those original DNG files,

then go up to the view menu and turn on show folders.

If it's not already on

so that you can see this sub folder right here.

These are the original DNG's

I'll just go ahead and double click on that folder.

And you can see that these files are twice as large

in each direction.

So in other words,

they measure 3,648 pixels wide

by 5,472 pixels tall.

One other thing I want you to see here,

I'm going to go ahead and click on one of these thumbnails

and then right click and choose Open in Camera Raw.

Or you can press Control+R or Command+R on the Mac

and notice that I've applied a few modifications over here

in the basic panel.

More importantly, however,

if I switch over to the Lens Corrections panel,

I've turned on both of these check boxes.

And so, in other words,

I've gotten rid of the Geometric Lens Distortion,

and I've also gotten rid of any Vignetting.

And assuming that you're shooting raw,

I recommend that you turn on both of these check boxes

for every image that you're going to be working with,

before you apply the photo merge command.

All right, so I'll just go ahead and cancel out here.

I am not going to be working with these big DNG files.

And so I'll switch back to the Arches folder right there,

and I'll go out to the view menu and choose show folders

to turn it off.

And that way we can focus on the images themselves.

All right, so when you're shooting these photographs,

what you want to do is face straight forward

at the center of your scene, as we're seeing here.

So I just selected that center image

and I press the space bar

to enter the full screen preview mode.

And you want to establish your focus and exposure

and lock things down.

Now, it's great if you have a tripod,

but it's not necessary.

I did not have a tripod on me in this case,

in which case, just face forward.

So plant your feet and then twist your body

all the way over to the right-hand side.

Or you can start on the left, if you like,

and notice that I'm starting too far over to the right.

So the more you capture the better.

And in this case, I'm actually twisting my body

more than 90 degrees.

And then you want to shoot a series of vertical shots.

Believe it or not, that's going to give you the best results

because you're going to have the most height information.

And then just go ahead and take a bunch of images,

try to keep the horizon flat as you do so,

and make sure that you have at least a third overlap

from one image to the next, as you can see, in my case,

I have more like a half overlap.

And so once again, the more, the better.

And then finally, I'm going way too far over here

to the left.

And I believe at this point, if I press the right arrow key,

once again, well,

I've got a little more imagery right there,

and then I'll go ahead and cycle over

to the far right-hand side.

So again, I'm starting with my body twisting

more than 90 degrees to the right,

and then I'm ending with my body twisted

more than 90 degrees to the left.

All right, so assuming you've got all these raw images,

I have 17 in all.

I'll go ahead and press Control+A or Command+A on a Mac

to select all of them.

And then I'll go up to the Tools menu,

choose Photoshop and choose photomerge.

And that's going to automatically switch you to Photoshop

as we're seeing here.

And that'll bring up that same photo merge dialog box

that we saw a moment ago.

Which may make you think,

"Well, why in the world is this approach so much better?"

Well, it goes ahead and automatically populates

the file list right here.

Then you want to turn on Blend Images Together.

In our case, we're going to leave Vignette Removal

and Geometric Distortion Correction turned off

because after all I already compensated

for the lens distortion inside Camera Raw,

before I saved off these JPEG files.

If however, you're working with JPEG files,

then go ahead and turn both of these check boxes on.

(upbeat music)

(upbeat music continues)