From the course: Shooting and Processing Panoramas

Should you flatten a panorama?

From the course: Shooting and Processing Panoramas

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Should you flatten a panorama?

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- Once your panoramic image is done, there are a few ways to get it ready for export. Let's first start about prepping the image and how you store it. Let's explore the impact of having a layered file. In this case, what you'll notice is that we have a document that has all of its layers intact for the panoramic photo. These have been merged together and not yet flattened. Now, I see that this document is currently taking up quite a bit of space, about 693 megabytes here of available disk space and 1.2 gigs of memory when it's opened. So, should you flatten? Well, that's really up to you. Typically since I have all the source images, I'll go ahead and flatten but if you're a bit noncommittal, there is a middle ground. Let's try an experiment here. I'm going to make a new version of this by going to the History panel and just click to create a new document from the current state. That's good, now it's open and what we're going to do is flatten this, so let's choose Layer, Flatten Image. Now let's save it. File, Save As. And now let's save this here and we'll call this Flat. And let that save to disk. Now we'll go to Adobe Bridge. The layered file is taking up quite a bit of space. I see, for example, that layered is taking up 1.74 gigabytes of space. The flatten file is taking up 693 megabytes of space. So, that's a big difference even though the pixel dimensions haven't changed. So, the key takeaway here is that understanding that layers add to file size, in this case, almost three items larger. Now, you don't have access to these same files because I didn't want you to have to download such a big file but the key thing to understand here is that a layered file is going to significantly add up to disk space, so you want to get out of layers once you know you've got a good merged document. I highly recommend you save your individual RAW images or TIFF files that you're using to make the panoramic photo. And then of course save the actual panoramic image but at some point, you can clean house a bit and get rid of all those layered files and interim renders that you've created.

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