Printing Panoramic Photographs

Perfecting Panoramic Photography Prints

I’ve always been a huge fan of panoramic photos, especially as someone who is often outdoors trying to capture the immense landscapes here in the Pacific Northwest. Unfortunately, because I’m often backcountry skiing or cycling or in a sea kayak, I often can’t afford to carry my tripod or simply don’t have the time to set it up. (I have to keep up with my friends you know!) Which means, if I want to capture a panoramic photograph, I really need to consider the landscape I’m in and how I’m going to photograph it without having to crop the hell out of it when I get home (and thereby reducing the quality of the photo.)

But this post isn’t necessarily about how to shoot a panoramic shot per se (I’m far from perfecting the skill of stitching multiple photos) but my experience with printing panoramic photographs using an 8-megapixel Canon Rebel XT digital camera and Epson R2400 photo printer. I’ve had no issues printing smaller panoramic images, such as 5×15 or 9×18. Despite only 8 megapixels and having to crop some of the image to get the panoramic look, any image noise has been pretty much undetectable.

As nice as these smaller prints are and look, I wanted to go larger. The reality is though, 8 megapixels isn’t a lot, especially when you start to think about printing something that is 24 inches or larger on the long side. I’ve printed a poster-size print of this skiing photograph and it came out great, but what was going to happen with a 12×36 panoramic image?

I’m happy to report the sea kayaking image below, printed at 12×36 using roll paper on my Epson R2400, came out pretty well, well enough to hang in a local coffee shop and one that I would feel comfortable selling.

So, the moral of the story is, don’t let the number of megapixels in your camera limit the size of your photograph prints. There are a couple Photoshop techniques to use to help salvage image quality when printing photos that are larger than the original size, the main being the use of the ‘bicubic smoother’, which I can touch on in a future post.