Albany, Western Australia, stitched panorama

From scanned negatives to stitched panorama.

Prior to the advent of digital photography,  I was in the habit of taking panels of sweeping panoramic scenes in the belief that one day I may be able to effectively combine them into satisfying “big image” type prints.    Whilst theoretically this may have been possible in the traditional darkroom,  in reality, it was quite impractical.    The best I could achieve was by laying together smaller prints,  typically 6×4 inch,  into a collage type arrangement to give at least an impression.

Digging through my old negatives from a trip I did to Western Australia back in 1990,  I rediscovered just such a series of images and decided to give them the digital processing necessary to finally achieve the kind of image that I hoped for all those years ago.    The scene is of the town of Albany on the south coast of Western Australia as viewed from a high vantage point.

With the negatives scanned into the computer,  I arranged the 6 frames as layers in Photoshop.  I’ve included the intermediate stage in the processing here as seen below.   As can be seen, a couple of the frames had to be warped and skewed a bit to get a good match.  Once I was happy that the frames were all in the right proportions,  I carried out the stitching,  straightened the image and cropped it.    Then,  over into Color Efex Pro for some colour enhancements and warming the image.