If you have Adobe Lightroom (2 or higher) and Photoshop (CS3 10.0.1 or higher) installed, merging pictures to a panorama becomes as simple as clicking 3 times!

I’ve always just handheld my camera to quickly snap a panorama.  It seems such a drag to carry tripods around during the day when there’s plenty of light about…
I usually expose a certain area of the sky which I know will make for a good exposure value.  Then I lock in this value, make sure my camera is set to high speed, tuck in my elbows, start spinning around and clicking away.  There has to be at least 1/3 overlap between each frame.  Since my camera is set to high speed, I end up probably overlapping more than half of each frame, but better too much than too little!

This is a very basic example taken on Philip Island, near Melbourne:

The Nobbies Panorama

Merged from 10 pictures with limited post-processing.
For a detailed explanation with screenshots for each step, check this video here.

But really it is as simple as:

  1. Select all pictures you want in the panorama in Lightroom
  2. Right-click and choose “Edit in Photoshop” -> “Merge to panorama”
  3. Do your thing in Photoshop (Choose Auto merge or Perspective)
  4. When finished go to File -> Save (this will save as a .psd and add to your Lightroom catalog automatically)
  5. In Lightroom 2, open your newly baked panorama and develop to your taste

Because this takes up quite a bit of your computer’s processing power, I tend to shoot the pictures in JPEG format rather than RAW.  If you prefer to shoot in RAW, then develop these files in Lightroom first, and export them to smaller JPEG files before merging them in Photoshop.
If you don’t have either of these programs yet, don’t forget you can download a trial version from the Adobe website which will let you try it 30 days for free…