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Your Panoramic Summer

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Summertime is a wonderful time to take the kind of photos that make great panoramas. With Zoner Photo Studio’s Browser window, select the series of photos that you want to turn into a panorama. Use the Panorama… command in the Publish menu. At the start of the Panorama wizard, you have one last chance to change which pictures will go into your panorama.

In the next step, make sure that the pictures are in the right order. If they are not, drag them and drop them to put them in the right order. There are buttons here for automatically ordering pictures by filename in ascending or descending order.

Before having the pictures joined for you, you get one last chance to adjust the basics of how they will be joined. Zoner Photo Studio can determine the most important parameter—the focal length—for you, by checking your pictures’ EXIF info. But if the program happens not to be able to make this calculation, or it miscalculates, you can also set the focal length semi-automatically and very accurately using the Determine… button.

You’ll want to have the camera manual on hand for this, since the calculation needs to know your choice of either the sensor size or lens coefficient. The More Options… button leads you to options that set how each source picture in the panorama is blended into the next, and how much each source picture is allowed to be rotated. If you shot your pictures by hand, then head into this window and give the program a little more leeway than usual for rotation. Once you click Join, the panorama is composed automatically.

But not unchangeably! If the panorama was assembled inaccurately, you can usually fix things by manually setting the joining points—points where the two overlapping source photos should have the exact same content. Normally, the program automatically places joining points in a nice collection of spots that are just that—identical in both neighboring pictures. But occasionally they can be too few, too many, or in less than ideal places. In that case, you can click in a joining rectangle to visit the window for editing joining points. The ideal places are the ones that are the most eye-catching, so above all, if you don't have pairs of join points in such places, then click and drag the existing points until you do!

The axis with a handle at the end shows how a source picture has been rotated. You can also use it to change the rotation.

Normally the program auto-crops your panorama before final processing. If you want to keep some extra edge material and only remove it during, say, later work in the Editor, then activate Do not crop.

TIP: Taking Pictures for Your Panorama

• Use a nice long focal length (use your camera’s zoom) to minimize the barrel distortion that’s caused when assembling a panorama.
• If you are forced to use a wide-angle lens (with no zoom), then at least take your pictures from up high. This makes the barrel distortion less noticeable.
• Keep your camera in one place while taking your shots, and rotate it around its vertical axis only, so all the source pictures are from the same location with the same tilt.
• Try to keep all the shots at the same height. All this leads to one thing: use a tripod if you can! The best tilt is none at all, because when the source pictures are taken with a tilt, the panorama forms an arc shape.
• The pictures you take should overlap by 30 to 50%, so that the program can find appropriate joining points.

Whenever you find panoramic scenes during your summer vacations and day trips, you can easily turn them into stunning panoramic photos using Zoner Photo Studio 12.

Tip: Now you can easily use Zoner Photo Studio to share photos with your friends and family on a photo sharing community. Create your own family photo album for free at www.zonerama.com

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