Photomerge Panorama in Elements 14

[Sayb]

I use PE 14 and when I try to create a panorama using photomerge in Guided edit mode, I keep getting the message "Documents must be saved before they can be merged"  Save where?  I open the photos I want to merge, they show up in the photo bin, I select them (CTRL + Enter), but when I hit the "create panorama" button, I just get the same message above and won't let me go any further.  Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong?..

[MichelBParis · Accepted solution]

This was a known issue in PSE14. The message appeared when an image in portrait mode was recorded as if it had been taken in usual landscape mode: pixels lines along the long edge and the orientation of the picture just indicated by an exif tag.

The workaround was to resave the image to a new file so that the pixels lines were along the short edge.

That bug has been corrected in newer PSE versions. There were other bugs for panoramas in PSE14...

[Nic 22]

Thank you MichelBParis.  

[Jay25273665y9uo]

Can anyone tell me exactly what this means? "The workaround was to resave the image to a new file so that the pixels lines were along the short edge. "

Thanks,

Jay

[MichelBParis]

Can anyone tell me exactly what this means? "The workaround was to resave the image to a new file so that the pixels lines were along the short edge. "

Thanks,

Jay

By @Jay25273665y9uo

Hi Jay,

I am sorry that my explanation was not clear, so I'll try to make it simpler.

When you shoot in a rectangular format, you can hold your camera vertically or horizontally. To save the pixels in a photo file format (an 'array' of pixels), the pixels are read line by line along the long edge and you need some external info to tell in which orientation (portrait or landscape) the pixels must be read to be displayed or printed. It's normally a metadata field in the exif header of your file. If  you rotate the file 90° left or right to correct a wrong orientation, the software corrects it and saves it with the right orientation field or by creating a new rotated array of the same pixels, switching length and width. Whichever way insures that the newly saved file version can be viewed according to your intent.

There was a bug in the way the software recognized the orientation of vertical pictures in the panorama feature in PSE14. As explained above, you can correct the orientation and resave yourself your file if necessary. However, even if your image is correctly displayed, you may have to use the same 'saving' trick to allow the photomerge panorama to make the new orientation known to the program.

I wonder how the mysterious error message may have been programmed without the programmers being aware of the vertical orientation bug; it was not understood in most cases.

[GCK]

I am using Photoshop v23.5.0 and this issue is still happening with image taken in portrait orientation.