Do not check "Keep as Layers" in the lower-right hand corner. The next screen shot will illustrate why.



This is the result of what you will get if you check "Keep as Layers." Not very good in my opinion. Not compared to what you will get if you don't check "Keep as Layers", which you'll see in the next screen shot.



Here is the result when I don't check "Keep as Layers." Much better.



Photomerge did a pretty good job "stitching" the photos together. We are left with a few minor problems to correct though. First thing to do is to crop. We'll start with the automatic "Crop and Straighten Photos" feature. To do this, I will go to the "File" menu and scroll down to "Automate" and scroll over and down to "Crop and Straighten Photos."



The "Crop and Straighten Photos" feature did some cropping for us, but there is still more cropping to be done manually. I could have skipped the auto crop feature, but it can be very useful in many situations(like to crop and straighten scans), so I thought I would point it out in case you aren't aware of it. I will select the "Crop" tool to manually crop the rest. I can do this by clicking on the "Crop" tool icon on the toolbar(it looks kinda like a square with overlapping lines) or just hit the "C" key.



I will manually crop this image with the "Crop" tool. Once selected, I left-click and drag around the part of the image I want to keep. You can see the bounding box in the screen shot below surrounding the good part of the image, not the black. When I have only the part of the image I want to keep selected, I just hit the "Enter" key or right-click and click "Crop."