May 30, 2003

Today's Image of the Day is a panorama of Tuolumne Meadows - a dazzling (and much less crowded) gem in the crown of the popular Yosemite State Park in California's High Sierras. Tuolumne first intrigued me years back, while on my way to Mono Lake. It seemed like the ultimate high mountain wilderness - pristine, sparkling streams winding through vast and untouched meadows, hidden swimming holes, and dramatic rock formations as well as abundant wildlife.

Having fiddled with above image in Photoshop Elements's PhotoMerge feature for quite a few hours today, brings me to another subject though: Panoramic photography.

A superb site to indulge and study successful examples of the craft is this danish panorama site. Don't leave without having seen the world in a breathtaking 360 from the top of Everest. For a as-good-as-it-gets-without-making-the-trip look at the ancient Mayan city of Tikal, go ahead and tool around here. And I just found this excellent guide for an intro on how to make panoramas.

My biggest problem when creating panoramas is always adjusting the hue, color and brightness of all images involved to get an even-looking end product. Due to varying light angles when shooting, most panoramas have vast differences in those areas, and making the adjustments across multiple images is a frustrating and time-consuming process.

Above panorama was stitched together from four images, and although the Panoguide site provides some guidance for color adjustments while shooting, I wish PhotoMerge would include a function that would even out color across the entire panorama.