When taking photography classes, often one of the first exercises is to make panoramas. Before digital cameras, this involved taking several pictures, often with the aid of a tripod, and lots of time spent in the dark room carefully lining up negatives and exposing them to strips of photographic paper. Today, Windows Live Photo Gallery 2011 and your Digital camera can do most of the work for you. Read this tutorial to find out how.

Choosing the Photos

The most difficult part about stitching panoramas is choosing the photos. The application automatically compares photos and combines, or stitches, them together to give you what generally appears to be a single long photo. You want photos that overlap enough so that Windows Live Photo Gallery 2011 recognizes them as being a contiguous picture, but different enough that you don’t worry about someone in photo one being partially stitched over in photo two. There also needs to be enough detail for the program to recognize the scene. Shooting against a cloudless sky, for instance, doesn’t really give the program a lot to work with and will likely fail. When you first use the Panorama feature it’s best to experiment with still photos that have few people and little movement in them. Below are the photos used in this tutorial. Note the overlap and the almost total lack of people.

Make a Workspace

When editing pictures it’s best to make a new folder and copy the photos to it. This way you don’t have to worry about making mistakes and loosing the original pictures. Start by clicking the New Folder button, found in the Home tab of the ribbon.

And name it “Panorama-workspace” (or something else to your liking).

Find the photos you wish to stitch together and select them by holding the Ctrl key and selecting each picture. Click on the Edit menu then on the Copy button.

Browse to the workspace folder you created and click the Paste button.

Getting to Work

Now that you have a safe workspace to experiment in, work can be done. Next you will stitch together the photos by clicking on the Create section. Select the photos you are stitching together (by holding the Ctrl key and selecting each picture) and click on the Panorama button.

You will now see the Stitching Panoramic Photo window open to inform you it’s compositing the photos.

When the program is finished combining the pictures, it will bring up a Save window where you can name your new creation.

Click the Save button and Windows Live Photo Gallery 2011 will save your new creation.

Some Clean Up Work is Needed

You aren’t quite done yet. Out of necessity, as part of the stitching process, some parts of the image have had to be enlarged or even distorted. This leaves an ugly black space around your photo.

To fix this, open the photo. Then click on the Crop tool found in the Edit section. A rectangle will appear. Drag the rectangle so that it covers most of the picture without any of the black space. Then hit Enter.

Time to Play

With this step you are done. When you browse away from the image, Windows Live Photo Gallery 2011 will auto-save the cropped image. One thing to note, your photos do not have to be in a single plane. The application is intelligent enough that if you shoot several rows of photos above each other it will try to combine them. Panoramic photos make for interesting variety in your photo taking. Experiment and play around, there are plenty of shots waiting to become panoramas.

Conclusion

As you can see, creating panoramic images is really easy with Windows Live Photo Gallery 2011. If you have any questions about the process, don’t hesitate to leave a comment. Also, for more interesting tips on working with this tool, check out the articles recommended below.

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How to Edit Photos with Windows Live Photo Gallery
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How to Set Up a Digital Photo Editing Environment in Windows