Photomerge Troubles

[mfsmith1964]

Hello all!

I'm having a heck of a time merging some images in photoshop and wonder is anyone can help.

I'm a teacher trying to merge individual photos of a sediment core, basically as a panorama, to show my class online. I have about 15 photos or some which were taken with 50% overlap, with a tripod at the same level, elevation, angle, etc. But I've tried all the options in photomerge and have yet to get them all stitched together. They come out totally all over the place. It seems like this should be very simple, but after hours of trying I'm ready to give up and manually compile them. Can someone perhaps help me figure out how to automate this properly? I attached some of the images below. I will attach the remainder in another post. If someone more savvy that I can figure this out and let me know the process, you would have the gratitude of a teacher struggling with online classes currently!

[mfsmith1964]

Here are the remaining images!

   

[c.pfaffenbichler]

I suspect the »non-moved« parts of the images (the floor and the tripod, I guess) might make it impossible for Photoshop to make meaningful alignments. 

[mfsmith1964]

Ah, good idea! I will try to crop them. Thank you!

[War Unicorn]

It's weird; I was able to do this without applying perspective correction:

When I tried it again with correction, it gave me a jumbled mess like you described. When I tried it once more with correction, I had to end task because it was taking way too long than it should have.

So I then tried dividing the images up, performing a photomerge on each group, and then photomerging the resulting merges. (I know, it sounds confusing. To put it simply, I took the 10 images, grouped them up by 2 each, then merged, resulting in 5 panoramas. I then took those 5 and did a panormama once more. The result:

Obviously, Photoshop has an easier time when it has less to work with, so start there. Still, I'm not entirely happy with the results.

If it were me? You took a great step in using a measure to indicate where you are in the panorama, so it'd be relatively easy to composite/mask all this by yourself using that measure as a guide. (This is actually what the panorama feature itself does, if you haven't noticed.) Take a look at what I did in just a couple of minutes, which I'd be far happier with; I haven't even started to mask or align layers yet:

[War Unicorn]

Forgot to mention: Those images you gave were pretty big to begin with; I ended up with a 12,000+ pixel-wide panorama originally. Photoshop might not have a happy-fun time with this as a result.

[mfsmith1964]

This is great! Thank you both so much for your input it's a lifesaver.

Ok, I will try merging batches and if that doesn't work, will take your suggested manual alignment approach.

Thanks again!