San Ysidro Border Panoramas

I'm pretty pleased with my first real endeavor into combining single images into panoramas in Photoshop. Photoshop comes with Photomerge, a plugin that automates (in most cases) the stiching of separate images into a panorama. It's not exact and I needed to do quite a bit of retouching to get them to work, but I'm pretty happy with the way they turned out.

After going through this process, the keys to making good panoramas are:

1) Shoot LOTS of images -- PS recommends that each image should overlap by about 40%. I think it's more like 75%, but my images had lots of details (cars, people, etc.), so the more they overlapped in my case, the better. Probably wouldn't matter in an image without a lot of small details.

2) Shoot with a lens/focal length that eliminates distortion on the edges--In my case, it took shooting at about 40mm (60mm with Nikon's 1.5x crop factor). I shot a panorama before I figured this out and all the straight-line details (e.g., buildings, light poles) on the edges were leaning towards the edges of the frame. This posed a huge, if not impossible, challenge when stiching the images together.

3) Consistent exposure through every frame -- This was pretty easy to achieve using the PS RAW plugin.

Here are the finished products: