Broaden your horizons
Learn how to create seamless panoramas using Photoshop’s Adobe Camera Raw plug-in
The mission
To create a seamless panorama in Adobe Camera Raw
Time
10 minutes
Skill level
Beginner Intermediate Advanced
Kit needed
Photoshop CC
There’s an increasing amount of crossover in editing tools between Camera Raw and Photoshop itself, and the panorama merging tools are a perfect example. It’s now possible to create seamless panoramic images straight from Camera Raw without having to open Photoshop at all.
There are advantages to doing it this way, partly because it is faster and partly because you get some interesting and highly effective merging tools. Using Camera Raw is especially efficient if you shot your original images in the Raw format, because there’s little point in converting them and opening them in Photoshop to merge them when you can do it as a single process from Camera Raw. It also outputs a ‘Raw’ panorama in Adobe’s DNG format, so you can still apply all the usual Raw processing decisions – exposure, white balance, distortion correction, curves and so on – even after the panorama has been created.
Inevitably, panoramas end up with rough edges because of the way the individual images have to be perspective-corrected, but Camera Raw has two options for dealing with this. Its Auto-Crop option crops right up to the edge of the image area, saving you from some precise and tedious manual cropping, while the Boundary Warp option distorts (warps) the image to fill the full panorama area.