Creating Panoramas in Fireworks
Panoramic photographs are not new - they've been around since the earliest days of photography. Recently they've come back into vogue, with computer photo manipulation and digital photography. There are an increasing number of applications for viewing and displaying panoramas, including a forthcoming viewer from the DMX Zone. (See references at end).
The websites about panoramas show examples of dazzling vistas of mountains or exotic beaches. Really impressive. But making one of your own can be a frustrating business. This article is about how to create your own panorama, using Macromedia Fireworks (MX2004). It applies also to Photoshop, but Photoshop(CS) has additional tools not available in Fireworks, so we'll take the "manual" approach here, and you'll learn more about the nuts and bolts of panorama making.
The exercise doesn't require high level expertise in FW, just the basics of selecting areas, doing a bit of Curves correction work, cropping, and a little bit of gradient masking. It does, however, require care and attention to detail if you want to create a first class panorama.
David Nicholls
David lives in Canberra, Australia. He trained in Upper Atmospheric Physics, but spent longer than he cares to admit as a Science bureaucrat in the Australian Government. He has been building websites since 1997, professionally since 1999. He is the co-author with Linda Rathgeber of "Playing with Fire", contributed the accessibility chapter to Dreamweaver MX Magic, and other bits and pieces. He has academic publications in areas as diverse as astrophysics and fractal ferns. His interests include photography, restoring golf antiques, collecting old
78 records, fern ecology, and he's also a HiFi freak. He teaches astronomy at a local community college."