How To Create a Panoramic Team Photo with Darkroom Software

Thanks to Wally Carnes for this guest post. Wally has been a professional photographer for 32 years specializing in weddings and social events. He began experimenting with digital capture in 2000 and switched completely from film to digital in early 2002. His past clients have included professional athletes and other high profile Dallasites. Corporate giants like Coke, Fujitsu and Harley Davidson are on his list as well.

Panoramic team photos are a popular item among high school and college teams and using Photoshop can be time consuming to do. As a challenge to defend Darkroom’s statement on our website “Minutes in Darkroom = hours in Photoshop” I am going to duplicate a cheer squad panoramic that was done in Photoshop and took approximately 2 hours to complete and do it all within Darkroom by creating a border that can be used over and over. All of the girls were photographed individually on a green screen.

We begin in the Border Workshop and create a new border. I want the finished size to be 11 inches by 30 inches so I use a custom size to match the original panoramic image. Next I add two editable text boxes, one at the top for the title and a smaller one at the bottom for the school name. In the Border Properties I can choose “Show text and options dialogs each time the border is loaded” and Darkroom will prompt me for the team name and other text as well as the option to choose the border background color and text color. Using the Add Photos button we can add photo boxes for each photo. In the Photo Object properties menu select Chroma-Key under the Transparency section so Darkroom will know this is a green screen image and drop out the background, also under “Advanced” check the box for “Allow photo to overlap composite objects”. Repeat this step for all of the photos, in this case, a total of 15 photos (you can add or remove photo boxes as needed). To darken the bottom of the image, add an Effect layer and choose Darken and then gradient bottom and make this and the text layer the bottom layers. You may need to adjust the photo boxes as you add images so they overlap correctly once you add your images.

Now we are ready to add our images and finish this project. In the Photo Workshop choose the Pano border and begin to add photos. You can make fine adjustments in the Drop Out and tab and also adjust the size of images to suit the situation. 2 hours in Photoshop = 15 minutes in Darkroom. The video is 4 times normal speed to keep it short but the actual time was a bit less than 15 minutes to set up the border and add the images. Examples of the finished images appear above. I made the team name in the Darkroom version italics so you can tell one from the other easily.