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Adobe Photoshop Integration: Panoramas Part 1

Hello internet and welcome back to creative live we're here with adobe camera optimizing, enhancing and retouching with mr jack davis now before I throw it back to jack, I want to let you guys know that we just got back from lunch and lucky for me I got to sit right across from jack during lunch and thank him for what a wonderful class he has taught these last few days and that's it really great for me and I'm sure that you guys out there would love to thank jack as well so what we'd love for you to do is go to our facebook page, which is facebook dot com slash creative lives and we have set up a thank you card for him so if you guys love this material, it resonates with you and you'd like to thank him we just ask that you go off there and take care of that so without any further ado jack, I'm gonna throw it back to you great, thank you very much, jim. Okay, what we've got is continuing on our how far we can push it. Joe became iran when we've pushed it too far. What do we do in terms ...

of going into our beloved twitter shop to save our proverbial posteriors? So that is kind of what we're up to this afternoon and a few of the topics that fit into this category are related two photoshopped capabilities poor combining multiple shots either for creating high dynamic range image or creating a panorama I touched on both of those briefly hadn't done in hd are but I would like to do both of those now and I think what I'll do is I'll start off with a panorama and basically I've got a shot first off I reset my workspace here in the bridge just we started off the very first day talking about this ability toe come up here and do things like moving around panels so we may have a little bit more useful set up for our image is the one thing I didn't mention is once you come up here and create what's known as a custom work space, you can go window workspace new workspace and save your work spaces because they're ones either one you just like yours better like I like mine better than theirs, but it could be that you also come up with custom work spaces for different projects that you're working on some that are, you know have different emphasize emphasise like as an example, they have a built in one called the light table where you can see all the images at one point and again by having something like your own preset like I've got up here rather than having to reset it, I can shift quickly over from one particular workspace metadata back to mine without needing toe create we created from scratch, so the saving of workspaces is something that you definitely want to take advantage of. I'm gonna come up here. I've got a serious of shots taken over on maui, and first thing when stitching together a panorama is going to be first to take advantage of the power of adobe camera and its processing, even though you may do a final tweak when you're all done, the idea of first doing everything that you can with in camera, especially since if you're working with raw files, you want to take advantage of those billions of colors before you bring them into photo shop, cook the file things like, ah, panorama stitch cannot be done, be a smart objects, they have to be regular dumb pixel phil layers and therefore making sure that you've got all your color and tone set before you create the panorama is, I think, essential there's no reason to delay that, especially since we can synch, organize the settings between our different shots and do it with one shot. We've actually tweaked the entire panorama. Also, depending upon how you're shooting a panorama, it could be if you're using some sort of automatic exposure, as opposed to emmanuel setting as you're doing your click, click, click rotating around your tripod, your nodal point. One of the main things you want to do with the tripod is that the exposure may be changing as you look toward the light in away from the light now normally that would be a no known why you shoot in emmanuel mode with your slr but even if you're doing that and chain in the exposure's air changing as you shoot um photo shop and photo merge we're going to try and compensate for that actually blend the exposure's the nice thing also though about a cr is since you're doing all of these will have all our shots over here on the left we confined to the exposure to kind of get them to match um so photo merge doesn't have quite the heavy lifting to do so we could synchronise them and then find tune them because as we're moving around in there changing exposures again, there may be just a variation on there, so I like it for that reason okay let's first thing is going to find a representational image that um is appropriate for the entire scene I'm mainly looking at this is looking up on the mountain at the clouds coming down over it so this right here this was going to be the tail end of it this will be the further end of it we probably be cropping that out though of course now that since we have our retouching tool right this may be that same thing with hell where we can come up here and get a little greedy and do our retouching here may be handled it more feather, we find little bit darker, like I said that maybe a little greedy in terms of atonality because we don't really have that exact same tone could also be like I said, that may be a little little greedy in terms of that remain span that size to allow for that feather let's leave retouching for another time. Like I said, I'm probably gonna crop that out two different areas. Esso I like this scene right here. I'm going to go through that tango just like we talked about before I'm gonna come up here in auto it's maybe brighten it up a little bit again, it's taking into account this dark foreground that I'll also probably be cropping out so I could use that as a starting point let's actually go back to the default. Actually, I do like that as a starting point, those middle tone values or fine in terms of exposure, so I'm gonna go right to my clarity get quite a bit of popping going on the shadows. I've got more than enough information in these shadows I'll take that highlight down that's where I am going to bring back the subtleties of these clouds um my white and black point I've got a full dynamic range and here I am, like I said, it probably going to crop this out so it could be if I'm not taking into account this foreground that I can drop those blacks down looking up here, this is my main area of interest here, so maybe resetting those a bit, it looks to me like I've got the white detail, even though those whites air going quite a a bit high to get that full dynamic range and I can find to in those a little bit it is kind of a gray cloudy day. So again, there's nothing saying that that having the full dynamic range is something that you need to shoot for that completely based upon the personality of that particular moment that you captured dark and moody, bright, shiny so there's no absolute there and then down to r vibrance here it is that those are lime green hills. When I bring up that vibrance now I can see that I've got a bit of a blue cast, a cool cast to it. I don't particularly mind that, but that's again, I'm using the white balance and I mentioned sometimes after I'm done with the tango, I can go back to the white balance because now I've kind of exaggerated all the tone and color in the file so now I can see that whether I use my eye, my great eye dropper, if I use that on the clouds, it will actually neutralize everything, so those air now back completely neutral, I probably don't need to get it totally neutral, so I'll just add the opposite of what I'm getting too much of which is blue, so I'll just add a little bit of yellow back in here just to give it a little bit more, okay, so here's our image, I like that I did use my excessive clarity because I can, in terms of that last step of the tango, using a little bit, yet you're not going to want to do that, because obviously, the last thing we want to do is have it exaggerate the corners we wantto bring these together, not separate them, which brings up a good point. One of the things with foot emerge inside of photo shop is the ability to automatically get rid of and yet, in other words, a natural falling off of the light on the corners of the images naturally goingto do that as an option within foot emerge. I'll let it do that in case there is a little bit of darkening on the edges of these files, I will let it automatically do that for me, I don't need to do that okay the other thing that I'm going to take advantage of his I'm gonna come up here especially since this was a light a dark file to begin with looking at original I'm getting some noise and probably haven't done my sharpening there's no reason why not to take advantage of the huge power of this sharpening and noise reduction tool built into here we've talked about the sharpening where I will oftentimes take the sharpening up to exaggerate the effect so I can see what's taking place that's come up here and zoom up so you can see it if it is a little bit soft I can't take that radius up it's really not softness is in an issue in the file remember holding down that option are all key would allow me to see that radius that sphere of influence so again I'm going to take it just above a pixel detail is the contrast within that area and in this case it is where you're going to be exaggerating noise if you didn't have a lot of flat area you can get away with a lot of detail in areas of texture in this case I have a lot of subtleties of clouds so I'm as I typically do we use detailed very judiciously I'm also right now you can see how much of the noises being sharpened in the subtleties I'm going to take advantage of the masking slider in a huge way and I'm going to take advantage of what I was just doing in these last two sliders of holding down that option key on the mac or the old key on the pc, and so I can say please on ly sharpen the edges, I don't need you to sharpen the subtleties like that I'm noise there, so I'm left behind with sharpening now I can see that effective detail, which I really don't like. I can play around with the radius the amount is way up, you notice if you find tune that masking and detail, you can actually get away with a lot more sharpening than you normally could, so I've got it at one fifty. I did that for exaggerating it, but we'll take that back to like a hundred hundred twenty I am getting some good sharpening their in terms of my noise reduction it's giving me the default of twenty five for the color I mentioned um that if you don't need it, you can see some of the christmas tree lights as it were has pulled out information so even a little bit of color noise reduction is going to take care of most of the color noise that default is twenty five that remains a little heavy handed, especially if you've got a lot of fine detail remember you get rid of color noise by blurring color information if you've got all sorts of subtle texture or people in a crowd in a scene that softening of noise, the color noise is actually going toe soften your detail and in terms of luminosity again, I don't mind the fact that we've got a little bit of grain as it were a little bit of noise there's nothing wrong with that. It doesn't need to be buttery smooth in the file, but that's giving me I think that good combination of a sharp edge on print which will look fine and it's tightening up my top of the hill and I'm minimizing some noise, okay, so I've got that too that image here here's my before and after in terms of my overall file okay, now going to synchronise thes these images are not next to each other I could shift, click up and ill shift from here to here and then I shift down and it did that you're wanting to make sure that you're tweaked image is the one that is in the centre um here because that is what's going to be the master when you synchronize it. I also mentioned yesterday that you have these sliders here so you can cycle through all the different images that are selected and tell the one that you want to work with is highlighted now we can synchronize we haven't done anything special in terms of cropping of the image so there's nothing stopping me from saying everything which would include actually you'll notice that now crop we even though you say everything it says you don't really mean everything to you so if I want to take it yes I really mean everything but aside from that that's everything now no longer means everything and used to now they've changed that so we've got that we're gonna come up here and say ok and now we've got all of our images tweaked we could just go through them and also we can expand this little area over here on the right hand side and just kind of check them in context whether they're looking like they're sharing that same exposure or it was one standing out like I said we're shooting arranged this is obviously muted light it could be that one is standing out significantly lighter or darker if that's the case if there is one that has a different exposure that's the great thing with the exposure slider it is mid tone value oftentimes it's just a little teeny exposure up or down okay we synchronized are sharpening our color our tone we're not using and even yet I'm not doing any targeted adjustments theoretically you could do a little graduated in the little you know graduated effect of the top but that is the great thing with the fact that now adobe camera is also built in the photo shop when you're done, you're taking advantage of this a cr before they're cooked into flattened files, so the color and tone is right there's nothing stopping you from once we are done with our panorama in photo shop to find tune it again using a camera as the filter with inside of photo shop okay, so I've done it and I'm going to say done they're now back in the bridge I did not open them up because I want to take advantage of that thing we showed the first day which is selecting in the bridge going up to tools photoshopped gives us access to this huge range of just incredible, incredibly powerful features built into the bridge. We also mention that first day things like dr brown services russell brown's, wonderful free scripts as the creative director for adobe that you have access to it russell brown dot com two esses two l's dot com but here what we have are these options here the ability to batch process that's going to use actions to batch process process your images contact sheet will create your contact sheet, a pdf with all sorts of images and their arrangements image processor we talked about that's how you should be out putting your image is cooking them once you've done your wonderful luscious coolness in a cr, the quickest way is to use image processor even though they've extended that save option within a cr, which actually now has a huge number of options, so it could be that you save directly from a cr, but it may be faster for you to come back to the bridge and use your entire project at one time len's correction you now have is a separate thing that's just going to open it up into photo shop and take advantage of lynn's correction. But you've seen that the upright feature is now built into a cr, so there's really no reason for you to come up here and used lynn's correction? Um, upright is the better way of doing it? Load files in a photo shop layers were going to use that in a little bit for some more advanced retouching marchi hbo program do that in a second to combine bracketed exposures photo merge is what we're talking about here in photo merge is our panorama stitching it automatically opens up the files you'll see down here the bottom you have that option. We did not use this when we brought in, um, uh, images before as layers, or you'll notice that this was all so that pretty much the same dialogue box when we used the auto align the other day when we we touch the glasses we used a similar feature that automatically alliance files we did not use vignette or geometric distortion in that sense but in this case we're going to do both this case is going to look at that exposure not only blend the images together but given extra little look at the corners to make sure that the tone of the corners is matching as close as possible and the geometric distortion correction it's actually going to go into the meta data if you can find the information related to the lens it's actually going to try and fix the curvature that is coming about by a wide angle lens all of which is extremely cool in the past even though you have all these options is your disposal in the past it was important to realise which ones are which now auto just does the best job they continue to refine the algorithms so I will mention right here that both the collage and the reposition are kind of cool because this would allow you to do what I call the tossed on the table collide right the old individual polaroids that you're not purposely trying to make one image what you want to do is take all these different shots align them automatically rotate into it if you want have them come up in alignment but stay distinct images that are not distorted they stay square and they will rotate into a position when you do that, I typically will taken at a little frame effect like old polaroid maybe even been the edges there stuff like that so it's really fun stuff you can do with photo merge that doesn't relate to create a single panorama image but both um collage and reposition our nice ones for doing special effects okay, well say auto come up here and hit okay it's going to open them all up, bring them into one document then do the auto align then that's going to do the auto blend? Those are actually different processes in photoshopped I'll give you a little tip well, it's doing that magic that if you're working on a huge panorama let's say that you're doing one there is they're aligning it now it's going to blend it, you'll notice that the blue well it had to be really quick it actually blended there are different exposures and even color balance it worked on color balance between them, but I was about to say before finished way too fast is that um if you have a very large panorama, you have fifty images that you're trying to stitch and you're using what's known as a checkerboard panorama, click click click, click, click, click, click click click and you're just getting greedy with wanting to make you know a terabyte image um there is nothing stopping you from open them all up as I layers and photo shop using that command inside of bridge load is layers it'll do that I was a pain in the butt, but it could do it because it was only doing one thing. Then you can select them all inside photo shop and you can go under edit and you can say auto align layers, dude, okay? And they will do it because it's only needing to do one thing it's not going to auto align all those layers because and then you do auto blend by breaking it up into those three different segments of loading them in, aligning them and then blending them it's less likely to choke and come back and say, dude, I couldn't do it. So you, khun actually stitch ridiculously large panoramas together. You may need to break this apart into separate stages. Otto a line from auto blend but that's exactly what photo merged just did its exact same algorithms. Okay, let's again, take a look at it was we did that first time. If we come over here, take a look at it, okay? You can see that seem right. No, you can't. Because it's freaking amazingly good, you'll also notice when it does that is that the seam that it found for the perfect blending of those two images that some kind of witchcraft you know code that says you know what that exact not that pixel not that one that pixel that right there and it's not a soft edge plan it's obviously what's known as a one pixel blend we turn off the mask, put one of these things here and, uh got a one actually went over here turn off the mask for all of these so there is the actual image without its mask you remember that shortcut? That shift allows us to turn off that mask and you'll see there is a little bit of a transition in terms of color in here kind of hard to see it, but this is warmer and right there is where you can now see the seam, but of course you won't see the scene when you're done because it's going to blend at that edge right there the colors are perfect exact match, so it does it not to a soft edge blending but it finds the perfect alignment of pixels wherever it is and then right at that edge it will match color tone white balance freaky, amazingly cool technology that being said you're left with these individual layers with these irregular layer masks is there any benefit to keeping these as distinct layers? Not really, it couldn't do it as a smart object to this much control it needs to work at a pixel level, so you're not actually having um any benefit to working at a pixel level sometimes if you're doing a panorama and there's like a car moving through it and you align it but you really didn't want the one with the car they were really close and one has a car and one doesn't so theoretically you could in a sense re prioritize these layers and retouch out the mask and you know, prioritize something that was moving in the scene but for the most part no there's no benefit so the first thing that I do doing a panorama is um and they start off selected so you've got your images here they start off like like that doing a commander control e emerge fine you do not need to keep them as separate files there is no benefit to it there's the pano tapping our key and even though you can see I was looking up at the mountain so I'm looking up so I'm getting a what's known as a keystone ng I'm getting a warping of the image as I looked up but in reality the line that I'm interested in is actually pretty straight uh one thing that I mentioned um the very first day on doing panorama stitching that's nice great feature in photo shop and I'll just share with you here even though that's a little bit awkward just because it's already pretty pretty much straight to things you khun dio to find tune you're panorama in terms of these edges and either their alignment or the fact that you are left with gaps that you don't want there's actually three things that will will talk about one is under your filter you have the adaptive wide angle brand new couple versions of photo shop ago they brought in puppet warp and they were using that to show people had a straighten up panorama is not designed for it puppet war prison awesome feature it's great for graphic designers who basically takes a photograph and puts it on a three dimensional plane that you can then manipulate the vectors off very, very cool great pro graphic design work not so much for photographs. This is fantastic. The adaptive wide angle is going to allow you to draw lines horizontal or vertical especially it with things that have architectural lines with it. Which again, I should bring up an image for that which has architecture in it but basically allows you whatever you click and drag. We will make a straight line now meaning that it's got a curve to it. It will make it straight if you know the secret mickey mouse club handshake. Not only will it take curved too straight, but it'll take tilted too straight that is, if you hold down the shift key, so if we come up here and we want this line right here to be straight and you do a shift key you'll notice that the line is blue as a starting point its default setting the first tool in the upper left hand corner of the interface up here is the tool that I'm working with its really the mean when you have to deal with and if you do it it's going to straighten whatever I do when I let go of it but if I hold down that shift key that's telling it that it's also going to make it perfectly horizontal or perfectly built vertical if it's close enough to this, you'll notice that it's switched from yellow to red and that means that it's now going to make that straight up and down so it knows um what you're trying to do so I come over here and let go it's going to straighten that line perfectly and that's what we did that first day with a horizon line if you have a really complex horizon line or you've done panorama where you're getting a wavy line and you probably will want to do several of these little um straight lines here but like I said, I'm really going I'm doing that command z I really don't need the straight line because it actually was already kind of where I want it so I'm gonna say you know what? I'm not going to use this at all because I kind of liked that line in there