Photography 01: River of Jugla - Photo Stitching in Adobe Photoshop

Don't have the wide angle lens? Photoshop to the rescue! 

Since photography is one of my favorite hobbies i would like to share an interesting way of making photos. Some might find it useful  or just fun to try it out.

Photo Stitching

The name says it all, it is one big photograph stitched together from a lot of smaller ones. Sounds interesting right? I thought so too when i first heard about it back when i was in university.

Back then i tested different applications to stitch the photographs together. Believe it or not but there are many cheap third party apps that are made specifically for this reasons. I tested them but at the end i found best application for photo stitching of course is the Adobe Photoshop. 

Those not familiar with Adobe Photoshop, it is a professional application used for retouch of photographs. I personally also love to use Adobe Lightroom in addition to that but that's not what the story is about. I found there is a function called Photomerge.

The idea is you take multiple photos and using the Photomerge function have them all stitched together automatically. 

Jugla

This is a photograph of the river of Jugla taken not far from where i live. The photograph is actually stitched together from 5 separate smaller photograph using Adobe Photoshop. 

This photo is retouched quit a bit including extensive work in Adobe Lightroom, adding some fog and things like that. Nevertheless, its biggest manipulation comes from photo stitching. Steemit doesn't make it justice quality wise since it actually has a resolution of  6000 x 1579 px.

Camera and Tips

I was using my Nikon D3200 camera with a standard  18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 VR lens. I wanted to prove it is possible to make incredibly high resolution wide photo with standard lens.

Couple of tips for this to work would include:

• Shoot from the same exact spot
• Shoot all shots right after each other so things like river, wind or clouds dont change as much.
• Keep in mind Photoshop will not give you a perfect rectangle and will provide you with some blank spots. Use the Fill - Content Aware function to fill those out and cut of things you don't want. 

Pros of this technique:

• Very high resolution as photograph is made from already high resolution peaces
• Saved money on expensive lens
• Learning something new

I hope you found this a bit interesting. If this kind of post gets recognition i might post also a detailed tutorial  on how to make these.

Thanks for reading!

I will be happy to hear some comments on whether these kind of posts are interesting for you.