• Height

  • Guideline: Panoramic images need to have a minimum height of 800px.

• Stitching

  • Common problems: Stitching artifacts. Colors or luminance are not consistent across the image. Horizon line sinusoidal or even more complicated shape.
  • Guideline: Getting a good panorama ready takes time. Recent releases of programs like hugin and Enblend make simple errors like bad alignment and ghosts at blurred seam lines less common than they used to be, but parallax errors and more intricate quality problems still occur. Two examples:

The ingredient photos were taken with a camera not in panorama mode, and camera-bundled software was used for the top stitch. One notices that the left part is darker, due to the camera exposing each photo individually. This could be dealt with by adjusting brightness before stitching.

More subtle errors are at the right of the castle, where there appear to be two vertical bands in the sky. Look where these bands touch the hill, at the middle one the stitching program misaligned, producing a ghost. Also, the program feathers the transitions. While this avoids a visible edge, one can see that in such feathering region, image noise is reduced, which makes these parts stand out from the rest of the image.

The bottom image shows that using different software, the photos can be stitched without such errors.

• Lighting

  • Common problem: different exposure in different images, leading to overexposure or visible differences in brightness and posterisation.
  • Guideline: Even when photos are taken with the camera in panorama mode, unless one chooses an overall exposure for all images to handle the brightest part of the brightest image, then blown highlights are likely.

If possible, set for underexposure, as well as panorama mode. Expected advances in software based exposure correction may soon make panorama construction viable from a photo series not shot in panoramic mode. Until then, use the brightest part of your panoramic scene to set the in-camera exposure when shooting.

Some software provides blending algorithms that make the seamline invisible. But if the brightness of the original photos differs significantly, one still notices a transition in between photos. A few minor misalignments notwithstanding, this is what the top photo shows.

Some programs incorporate brightness adjustment for the photos, but the algorithm has to be designed carefully otherwise one can end up with posterisation effects like the purple and light blue patches in the clouds on the left in the bottom image.

• Vignetting

  • Blending-only programs can do away with seam lines and smooth structure using feathered overblending, but to correct lens vignetting one needs a radius-dependent brightness correction.

The left image shows a technically acceptable stitch, except for the vignetting effect which has been strongly exaggerated. Good stitching programs incorporate vignetting correction. Make sure to incorporate good vignetting correction. Pre-processing the input images is less elegant, but one can obtain good results. In the sky can be seen three bright areas, separated by two darker bands. These correspond to the middles and the sides of the three original images. Although programs like Enblend remove visible seam lines, they do not remove vignetting effects. In the sequence hugin-enblend it is at the hugin stage where vignetting has to be corrected, either inside a recent hugin version or as already corrected input.

On the right is a more subtle example of vignetting, most visible in the sky, where one can see three bright areas from left to right separated by two darker bands. These correspond to the middle and the sides/corners of the three original images.

See in the photo below how the sky brightness spans the spectrum without being burnt out, but still the sky brightness has a wavy structure, most noticeable in the left part.

• Camera positioning

For the left stitch, the photographer captured the bottom part of the church, then stepped left and took a photo of the top part. The seam line is visible in the windows just below the clock, and one sees shifts in different directions in the middle and on the tower structures. Stitching software is not meant to cope with such parallax error as the problem here is located behind the camera, and the way out in this case was the availability of matching photos, albeit from a different perspective, to create the image on the right.

• Image alignment

Proper alignment of images is a crucial first step and has been achieved in this view taken in the Western Scottish Highlands. But the exposure differs between images and cameras have vignetting, both make seamlines visible. And as these photos have been aligned regarding the distant features, some parallax errors can be seen at seamlines in the foreground. There exists software that makes such seams disappear and the parallax errors can be concealed by choosing a suitable seamline.

• Composition

  • Common problems: Panoramas frequently lack a central focal point. If taken within urban settings, much of the scene may be uninteresting with unattractive features such as rubbish bins and light poles almost impossible to avoid.

Different color spaces exist, which determine how the colors in an image are stored and displayed. sRGB is most common and compatible, while other color spaces, notably Adobe RGB, allow more colors but are less compatible, and must be correctly supported by users' computers.

Simplest is to use sRGB, which is usually default on Windows and Linux, but must be selected when saving files on Mac (prior to OS X 10.6). For further options, read on.

Please see “sRGB Correct ColorSpace Tutorial for the Internet” by Gary Ballard for illustration of problems of mismatched color spaces.

Images should either be in sRGB (either untagged, or specifically tagged as sRGB), or, if in another color space, explicitly tagged as such. Tagging means either including an Exif tag with the name of the color space (options are "sRGB", "Adobe RGB", and "other"), or including an ICC profile, which explicitly specifies the color space. Including an embedded profile is safer, as Exif tags are not always respected by web browsers. Untagged non-sRGB images ("mystery meat") will not render correctly on the vast majority of computers.

For most Windows and Linux users, sRGB is default unless changed, and untagged images will generally be sRGB. However, Mac users should take care that their images are exported in sRGB, and not "Generic RGB" or "Apple RGB".

Best color spaces are sRGB or, optionally, Adobe RGB, which is wider, as these are standard color spaces and hence easiest to support and for other editors to use. If using a non-sRGB color space – say for greater color range – consider making an sRGB version of the image for greater compatibility.

It is safest to use sRGB: which is the default on most computers, including Windows and Mac OS X 10.6 and later. Images in other color spaces will not render correctly at all in many web browsers; color profile support is included and enabled by default in Safari, and in Firefox 3.5, but not in all browsers.

Untagged non-sRGB images will not render correctly except by chance. Notably, untagged Mac images prior to OS X 10.6 used a different color space (Apple RGB prior to OS X, "Generic RGB" in OS X prior to 10.6), which notably included a gamma of 1.8, rather than 2.2; these images thus appearing dark when viewed on non-Mac computer that assumes sRGB (with gamma of 2.2).