Create a perfect panorama

Learn how to reveal a wider view of a scenic location from separate shots

Use the Panorama tool to stitch a series of stills together as a seamless image

After snapping a shot of a scenic landscape, we may end up with a disappointing photograph that fails to match

our memory of the location. This is partly because our eyesight’s field of view is wider than that of our camera’s lens, so the photo only portrays a portion of the scene that we remember. We could pop a wide-angle lens on a digital SLR camera if we have one, but many of us are stuck with a fixed lens, such as the one on our iPhone.

To help us record more of a location’s detail, the iPhone’s Camera app has a panorama (Pano) shooting mode. This enables us to pan left (or right if you tap on the arrow) to record a wider field of view. However, shooting an effective panorama using the iPhone is a challenge. If you pan the iPhone too quickly or unevenly, there may be misaligned edges throughout the image. If you don’t pan the iPhone on a consistently horizontal plane then the Camera app will automatically crop uneven edges, causing a loss of important detail.

Fortunately, Affinity Photo has a powerful Panorama tool that can take a series of still images and stitch them together as one seamless panoramic picture. If there are misaligned edges in the overlapping photos, you can remove them using the Clone tool.

New pixel generation

After stitching several handheld shots together, you will end up with an uneven border. Instead of automatically cropping out the raggedy edges, as per iPhone’s Pano mode, Affinity Photo enables you to generate new pixels based on the image’s content. In the case of the cave panorama we’ve used to illustrate this technique, Affinity Photo can generate new rock and sky pixels to help avoid too much edge cropping.

To shoot a series of stills that are suitable for an effective panorama, you’ll need to set your camera’s exposure mode to manual. On an iPhone, you can do this by holding your finger on the screen until the AE/AF LOCK indicator appears. This locked exposure stops the sky changing tone or colour in the complete stitched version. Snap a few shots as you pan the camera and make sure that their edges overlap.