Have you ever wanted to photograph a beautiful mountain view or other sweeping landscape but found it too wide for a single picture? Well, it’s easy to create a panoramic picture of even the widest scene, even with an inexpensive point-and-shoot digital camera.
Hi. I’m John Swenson, a writer on the Windows team at Microsoft. Today I’m going to show you how to create a panoramic photo using Windows Live Photo Gallery.
Windows Live Photo Gallery is a new version of Photo Gallery that you can install on Windows Vista or Windows XP. It includes a new feature for creating panoramas.
First I’ll show you how to shoot photos for your panorama; then I’ll show you how I created my panorama.
Start by finding a scene that would make a good panorama, such as a wide city skyline or view across a broad valley—something too wide to fit into one picture.
You need to take multiple photos of your scene all in a row. Start at one end of the scene and take a photo, and turn just enough to overlap the last shot by about a third. Don’t worry if you overlap more than that—it won’t hurt.
Hold your camera steady and keep going until you’ve photographed the entire scene you want to capture.
Try not to turn your camera up or down as you move, or you might end up with a crooked horizon.
I usually shoot three to five photos, unless I’m shooting a really wide scene, when I shoot more.
Now that we've got our shots, let's go inside and stitch them together into a panorama using Windows Live Photo Gallery.
If you don’t already have Windows Live Photo Gallery, you can download it for free.
Now it's time to create the panorama. I'm actually going to use some photos I took on a recent trip. I'll start by importing photos from my camera into my computer. First, I'll plug in the camera. Windows has detected the pictures on my camera and is asking me how I want to import them. I'll choose Import pictures and videos using Windows Live Photo Gallery. Now I'll click Import all new items now.
There they are. These are the three photos I want to make into a panorama. When I took these photos, I decided to shoot several photos and create a panorama. I was careful to overlap these photos enough so I could later assemble them into one wide, continuous panorama. Notice how much they overlap?
Now I'll select the photos I want to stitch together. To select multiple photos, hold down the CTRL key, and then click each of the photos.
Next, I’ll click Make, and then Create panoramic photo.
That’s it! Now I’ll wait while Windows Live Photo Gallery stitches them.
This might take a few minutes, especially if you have large photos or are stitching together a lot of photos.
It’s done.
Once you're satisfied with the stitched photo, crop the panorama into a nice, clean rectangle, like this.
Finish by doing any retouching you want to the panorama, such as adjusting its color or exposure.
When you’re all done, you can sit back and admire the beautiful scene all over again, as much as you want!
