A Panorama are multiple pictures stitched together to form one large photograph. The field of view in these photographs can be much larger than any lens you could ever purchase (in face some photographs are 360 degree views)

There are lots of programs that can stitch together panoramas. The two main programs used right now are : Photoshop and Stitcher

We are going to do ours in Photoshop.

Parallax is the shift in perspective that occurs from different view points. (Hold your finger in front of your eyes and close one of them. Now switch and open and close the opposite eye. Your finger seems to move back and forth.

While it is definitely better to use a tripod, you are still going to get some parallax errors. If you want a perfect stitch with little to no work, you are going to need a special Panoramic Tripod.

Shooting Suggestions:

1) Use a Tripod. (See parallax sidebar)

2) Set your camera to Manual. (To control Exposure and Apature) - If you camera changes exposure or Apature during the sequence you will have noticeable lines running down your pictures. This is because it's over or under exposing, depending on where it's pointing. It is possible to make it less noticeable, but why make more work for yourself?

3) Use manual focus. If your camera re-focuses during the sequence, your pictures will not stitch together properly.

4) Don't zoom during sequence

5) Don't use auto white balance (less important when shooting raw)

6) Don't use a Polarizing filter. This filter is usually the first thing you should grab for when shooting any types of landscapes, but it will darken the sky to different ammounts. This will make it almost impossible to match different pictures.

7) Start taking your pictures. Overlap each picture by about 1/3 to 1/4. This will give the stitching program enough information to be able to automatically stitch things together. You can take as many as you want (including double or triple rows) but keep in mind the more you take, the more work it will be later on. If you want to take 360 degree panoramas, you will need to invest in a Panoramic Tripod

After transferring your pictures from your camera to your computer, here are the steps needed:

Starting in Bridge:

Navigate to where you put your pictures. Select your first picture. Press the shift button and select your last picture. This should highlight every picture in between.

Choose Tools>Photoshop>Photomerge

Starting in Photoshop

Choose File>Automate>Photomerge

Choose Browse

Click your first image. Shift click your last image and hit OK

Both

You should now be at the same point no matter where you started.

You only have 2 decisions to make now:

What layout to use:

I always use cylindrical. I find it gives me the most undistorted image, for the most amount of useable area.

Perspective is good, but because of the bow tie effects of this format, you loose a lot of your image.

The only other decision is to turn Blend Images on or not.

Photoshop does a pretty good job of blending the images (both masks, and tonality), so I usually use this setting. You can always to back and adjust the masks yourself by hand if there are any problems (and there will be!)

Flatten your image at 100%, and then shrink your image for it's final output. If you do it the other way, you can sometimes see where the masks don't line up properly (this really confused me for a bit!).

Previous versions of photoshop had problems with blurry objects. (Pic to left). This would be the result of Paralax errors, and again, you had to go in and hand paint the masks to get rid of them.

You can use many things to manipulate your mask, but most people paint on it with the pain brush (Hotkey b)

Anything that you paint in black will become transparent. Anything that you paint in White will be opaque (visible).

You can control the size of your brush by using the left square bracket to make it smaller, and the right square bracket to make it larger (the square brackets are right beside the P button). You can quickly paint large areas of the screen, then shrink it down and paint in small details.

If you have any other problems (dust on the sensor) you can use the clone or healing tools (make sure you have selected the right layer)

Here are a couple of links to some sites that show you how to design your own Panorama head. I'm going to try the first one to begin.:

http://www.tawbaware.com/maxlyons/panhead_d60.htm

http://www.worth1000.com/tutorial.asp?sid=161123&page=1

http://www.mejiatryti.com/Panoramas/diyqtvrhead.html