A Panoramic View of a Meadow

I don’t know what rock I have been living under, but I had no idea until recently that Photoshop has an easy photomerge function that stitches individual images together to form a panoramic. I use the CS6 version of Photoshop, but current versions of Elements include this feature too. Several online tutorials are available if you are interested in trying it for yourself. However, I must caution that the use of a tripod is essential if you want to achieve good results.

Before we depart for our latest adventure, I decided to try out the technique when we visited Cades Cove last week. I walked out into a lovely meadow and took four individual shots on a zoom setting about 40mm (full-frame sensor). When I got back to my computer at home, I ran the images through Adobe Camera RAW first and took care to eliminate any vignette caused by the lens. (I shoot in RAW format.) Then I combined the four photos together using the photomerge function in CS6. The combined image file ended up being huge, so I resized it down to make it more manageable. Of course, I also performed some of my typical editing. It all worked beautifully!

Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee

If you can’t experience an April view of a pastoral Cades Cove meadow in person, let me bring the view to you! Please click to make this panoramic image larger. The blogger template column makes it look tiny, but I can assure you that it is not.