How to stitch a panorama on your PC

Shoot overlapping photos, then choose File > Automate > Panorama in Paint by Zaweba. It matches the overlaps, joins the photos in the layout you choose, and can remove lens vignetting, correct distortion and fill the ragged edges with Smart Fill. All of it runs offline on your own PC, with nothing to upload.

A panorama gets in more than a lens can see in one frame: a wide mountain view, a city skyline, the inside of a church. Stitching several photos also gives far more pixels than a single shot, which makes panoramas great for large prints.

Shooting for a good stitch

Overlap each photo with the next by about a third. Too little overlap and the software can't find matching points.

Turn the camera rather than walking along. Pivot on the spot, ideally around the lens rather than your body, which reduces parallax, the shifting of near objects against far ones. Parallax is what causes most stitching errors.

Keep exposure, white balance and focus the same for every frame. Varying exposure leaves bands of different brightness across the sky.

Step by step

Choose File > Automate > Panorama and add the photos. Pick a layout.

Auto lets Paint choose. Perspective keeps straight lines straight and suits panoramas that aren't very wide. Cylindrical wraps the photos round a cylinder, which suits wide horizontal views like a skyline. Spherical suits very wide views and full circles, including shots that go high and low. Collage and Reposition move the photos into place without bending them, useful for flat subjects like a long mural.

Turn on vignette removal so darker corners don't create a pattern of dark patches along the sky, and distortion correction if your lens bends lines.

Run it. The photos are joined into one picture. Because the frames don't line up perfectly at the edges, the result usually has ragged borders, and Smart Fill can fill those gaps from the surrounding picture instead of cropping them away.

Finishing off

Straighten the horizon with the Crop tool if it wanders, then crop. Check the joins at 100 percent, especially across people, fences and the edges of buildings, where a small misalignment shows. The clone stamp and healing tools tidy small faults.

If you used Smart Fill on large gaps, look at what it made. It's excellent on sky, grass, water and sand, and less reliable where there was detail.

Doing it by hand

For more control, load the photos as layers and use Auto-Align Layers, which offers Auto, Perspective, Cylindrical and Reposition only. Then Auto-Blend Layers makes the joins as layer masks, with even tones and colours. Because the joins are masks, you can paint on them to move a seam away from a face or an awkward spot.

Getting a good result

Shoot more than you need. Extra sky and ground give room to crop and straighten. Avoid moving subjects in the overlap areas, since a person walking through will appear twice or be cut in half. And for very wide views, cylindrical or spherical layouts look more natural than perspective, which stretches the edges heavily.

Once stitched, a full 360 degree panorama can also be turned into a little planet with Filter > Distort > Panorama Projection. Paint by Zaweba takes you from overlapping frames to a finished wide picture without leaving the editor.