How to Take Pictures for a Panorama

If you want to achieve perfect results, we recommend that you follow several guidelines when taking the source shots that will make joining the shots later on as easy as possible. The result will be a panorama with nearly invisible transitions between source shots.

The individual shots should be taken with a lens with a relatively large focal length. Wide-angle lenses (especially zoom lenses) often suffer from barrel distortion, so shots from them cannot be joined precisely. If it’s not possible to use a lens with a large focal length (because you can’t stand far enough back from the subject), it’s a good idea to at least turn the camera on its side (although you will need to take more shots, they will be easier to join).
You should “rotate” the camera around the center of the subject as you take shots. If you do not, the individual shots will have been taken from slightly different angles, which again makes correct joining difficult (especially for nearby objects). This demand can only be met completely when you use special tools, but even just placing the camera on a tripod and taking advantage of that can help. When you take the shots by hand, it is practically impossible to meet this demand and thus it will not be possible to join shots entirely correctly.
The only camera rotation between shots should be along the camera’s vertical axis. This goal too is most easily met using a tripod. (Ideally, you should level it using a level, and tripods tend to include one.) When taking pictures by hand, it's important to try to turn the camera in one dimension only.
The lens should lie flat, because if the lens is tilted upwards or downwards (e.g. when taking pictures from a hilltop), the panorama can “arc” (depending on how strong the tilt is), making it hard to crop.
The overlap between shots should ideally be from 30 to 50 percent. If the overlap is smaller, it can be hard to find common points for adjacent shots, and the shots will be joined in their edge areas, where lenses’ optical defects are most apparent, so the joining areas will be more apparent. Larger overlaps, on the order of 70 - 80 %, are too much for the program to account for, and so they can also cause bad joining.
If lighting conditions are fairly similar throughout the photographed scene, it’s a good idea to use exposure locking. If, however, the lighting conditions differ too much between shots and thus exposure locking would make one or more of them underexposed or overexposed, we recommend that you set exposure by hand and use exposure correction to balance out the exposure differences between shots. You can of course also use the camera’s automated functions for exposure, but in this case the exposure levels of individual shots can be vary vastly, and even though the joining algorithm does a good job of evening out these differences, the transitions between shots can be more visible here than they would be otherwise. If your camera enables it, we recommend that you definitely manually set white balance.