Everybody seems to own a camera these days. Some own a compact camera, some own a DSLR or digital single-lens reflex camera. They can do a lot of things compared to the price you pay them but there are some things that they just can not do.

Merging two images for example. Try photographing a panoramic scene with only one photograph. If you don't own a wide angle lens this will be pretty much impossible. If you do own one then you are one lucky man. Luckily there are other ways to create nice panoramic images. That's exactly what I'm going to tell you in this article.
First I'm going to tell you what technique you should use if you want to create panoramic pictures like the example above. Second I will talk about a technique that you can use to merge any image you want. To end this article I'm going to tell you what the best programs are to merge two images with.

Here we go.
Before we start there are some things you are going to need. A camera, obviously, to take your images with. Something to keep your camera from moving. This can be a tripod or anything else. This will help you a lot as it makes it easier afterward to merge them together. Finally you are going to need some photo editing software. If you have Photoshop then you're in luck. If you don't then you can download gimp for free.

In order to get a good merge you need to take four or five pictures of your scene. To make things easy on yourself make sure you overlay the right sides of the photographs with the left side of the next photographs. Continue doing this until you have captured the whole scene.

Open up your favorite photo editing software and load your images. Let's say you are using Photoshop. This program is making it easy for you because it has a feature that automatically aligns your images and merges them together to create a panoramic picture. Do this by clicking file? automate? photomerge and load your images.

You can use gimp as well but it might take a little longer. Open up a new file and make sure the height matches that of your photographs. Change the width to something extremely wide. Put all your images into one file so you can work with them easily. Make sure you can see what you are doing so change the opacity to two0 percent. Align the features of your first photograph with those of your second photograph. This is where the overlaying comes in handy. Once you have done the first and the second image you can do this for the rest of the images. Eventually you should end up with one long panoramic picture.

To merge any image with another one open up Photoshop or gimp. Load your two images and put them into the same file so you can merge them. Go to layers? add layer mask. In Photoshop you can click the little mask button next to the "fx" button. In gimp it's a little easier. Just right click and choose "add layer mask." With layer masks you can't use any color. It only recognizes black or white. Black represents the part that is not going to be visible and white represents the area that is going to be visible. If you want to merge two images together you can fill the mask with a black to white gradient. This will make the transition between the two pictures perfect.

I hope this helped you out and I know you'll have fun with this. If you want to learn more about the basics of photography and how to create beautiful images check out my blog.