Photo-stitching with Photoshop

I recently tried to capture a single frame of the wreck Napoli with my 300mm telephoto mounted on the D200. This effectively becomes a 450mm telephoto set up and I was surprised to find that I could not fit the wreck into one frame. So I took two.

The first thing I didn't do was set the exposure to manual. This meant I had to do some adjusting within Lightroom until the two frames had the same "exposure". I then straightened both images using the horizon as a benchmark. This was important for the stitching to work. Next I simply enlarged the canvas of one frame and copied the other image onto it, moving its layer around until it matched. The seam is just about impossible to detect. I then collapsed the layers and saved the image. I also changed the color temperature setting as the weather and light were not perfect.

Here is the result.