Lessons

Lesson Info

HDR and Panoramics

Now that we've selected an organized our images, it's time to go in and start working on them. But the reason we started with R H d ours and generally speaking, when I go through and select a set of images and I havent HDR or a panel that's kind of in the mix of them, I'm going to go in and select, um, all of those images together. So I'm gonna make sure that when I'm looking at my images, I'm going Teoh to select those images. And by the way, a very strange thing about light room desktop is that the key stroke for pick for picking or flagging is no longer P for pick. It is not even F for flag, it's Z. Now you figure that one out, but it Z so instead of Z for zoom, it's Z for flag or pick. I have no idea what they were thinking when they did that, but there it is. So if you want to pick something, if you want to add a flag, you have to hit the Z key or you can click on the actual flag itself. But what I do is I go through, and I select a set of images that are going to be a Pano or goi...

ng to be an HDR, and I pick all of that. Siri's And the best way to do that, especially on an HD are, is to look at the HDR in the middle, and that's the one you want to compare it with. So you're gonna look at that one because that gives you the composition, gives you the general exposure. So if you like that image, zoom in it. It's sharp enough. Then when you come back out here, highlight all of those and then go ahead and pick them. Um, so that's how I initially go through in select images. Now, most of the time when we're traveling, we're not taking all HD ours and all panels. So this this is a little bit odd because we're looking at all HD ours and panels, but that's just because I wanted to show you several of these upfront. But when I'm going through images, I'll just pick the ones that I'm interested in. Then when I hit a Pano usually might try it three different ways, or I might try toe try three different HD ours or I might, especially if I'm hand holding an HDR. I'll do it several times to make sure that I didn't move the camera or something like that. What I was doing it. Because usually I'm not on a tripod when I'm doing HD ours because I'm wandering around and I'm inside a church or I'm inside somewhere. That doesn't allow tripods because that's professional. So, um, once I have those selected and I'm ready to start adjusting and working on images, it's important to recognize one very important thing about HD Ours and panels. Light room desktop Just like Lightning Classic is going to stitch the panel or combine the HDR before you do any adjustments. So if you go in and start adjusting the images, it's a waste of your time. You have to stitch it first and then work on the image, or you have to combine the HDR first and then work on the image. So don't worry about going into the developing area on. I'm used to seeing develop module because I'm used like classic. But don't worry about going into the control area here where all of your adjustments are until you've actually stitched. So let's talk about that, Raina. Let's do an HDR. And this is the HDR that I want to dio um And I'm gonna size these up so we can see him a little bit better. Um, I like this HDR. This is the one that I was talking about that has the bird that's traveling through it. So if I double click this and I zoom in, you can see that there's that bird that soaring up in the sky. So I'm going to go back to the grid and right click those three images that have been selected and I'm going to go down to the photo merge option and the photo merge option. I'm going to choose HDR merge, and it's going to start merging and creating a preview for me. There is the preview, and I want you to notice that the bird which has been moving through the three photographs see that burger it's ah, let me zoom in on it. It's just one bird. So the HDR merging is so amazing. Inside a light moment, I just I get giddy about it. It's so cool that it is actually figuring out that I have a moving object and it's choosing the object where it thinks it ought to be, and then it's It's actually getting rid of the object in the other places by choosing a different part of that photo. So it's a lot of voodoo going on there, and I'm pretty excited about it. So, um, I love what it's doing on the HDR. Emerge now there's a couple controls you can auto a line, which is important. In fact, I'm, quite frankly, don't understand why they even have that option because it should auto align anyway. Um, and then there's apply auto settings. If you apply the auto settings, it does its own computation. Try and figure out the best exposure, and it's not always right, but it gets you in the neighborhood, so generally I let it do it, and then I have to play around with it. And then there's ghosting. Ghosting is when you have moving objects and you want to avoid those moving objects. Now, in this case, there's a moving object right here, that bird. But it didn't, um, it didn't end up making weird issues, so if you have like a person that's moving around or whatever you can say. I don't want to see any ghosting issues so you can increase the ghosting. And so when I do that, it's re computation and figuring out what's moving. And it's going to make Mawr adjustments to make sure that there's no weird movement issues. And so now I can show where it's fixing the ghosting and you can see little red dots and let me zoom in onto one way down there. You can see that there's some people right there, So watch this. When I turn it off, it's It's been ghosting is something's ghosting down there. There's a car over here that it's editing. And so all of those things are being edited based on some kind of movement that it saw that it didn't like or it was causing, like a ghosting issue. So, um, I'm gonna turn the ghosting the option off and then we'll zoom in there and I I still can't see exact. There must be some kind of blur going on that it's on those people now, remember, when I'm doing an HDR, I'm rapid firing. I'm going. Did it just like that, just as fast as possible. And so there's not a lot of movement that happens when you do a really high speed shutter burst, Um, on an HDR. But anyway, so it's merged it. I'm gonna click on Merge, and it's going to merge all of those images, and then it's going to put them into a stack. There it is. So it just finished stack. So now you can see there's the HDR image here. And then there's a four up here that tells you it's a stack of four images, but there's Mawr images below it, and if I click on that, it shows me the stack down here in the filmstrip area, which is much different than inside of Light from Classic Light from Classic had just pulled him out in the grid for you. But this actually just shows him down below. Okay, we're going to leave the HDR right now, and we're going to go to a panel, and the panel that I've chosen to use is this one here. It's the panel that I did of a roof of a ceiling in in ST Peter's Cathedral, and I'm going like this because there's no way I don't have a wide enough lens to capture the entire ceiling, and I kind of want to see the whole thing. And so it's kind of an unconventional because usually on a panel you go like this, but you'll be surprised at what you could do with panel. So the next time you're out and taking a picture and you don't have a wide enough lens, just take your camera and shoot like this like you can just shoot boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom boom boom boom boom like that in a big grid. You could even do it randomly. Just just go like this and it will find it, stitch it and make a panel for you. But it can make a panel in any direction that you want it. Teoh. It doesn't have to be in one sweeping motion. It can be in a grid like this. It can be in a grid like this. It could be straight up and down like this. Um, you could kind of go like like, this doesn't matter. Just the MAWR imagery you have, the better, but it's good to make sure that you are being methodical about it. to make sure you have plenty of overlapping coverage. So I try and overlapped by about 1/3 at least if half is even better. And also a panels better if you're able to kind of be it a normal lens rather than a white England's. So the more normal year lenses, the better your your panel will be. So, for instance, in this circumstance, I'm actually using a wide lens, and I'm going like this. But if I had used UH, 50 millimeter lens and gone like this and then like this and then like this, it would have actually been better, cause it wouldn't have had as much warping in it. So light room is really good at stitching panels, so I'm gonna click on these and right click them and I'm going Teoh a gun, go to the photo merge, and this time I'm going to do a panorama emerge. And there's a couple things that we need to discuss when we might as well discuss him while it's creating the preview. The first is a spherical merge, so stitching at satirically versus Cylindrical E versus perspective, there's big difference between all of those so spherical when you. When you think about spherical, it's like you're usually you're You're showing an image like this and you've got a vertical shot and you're going like this and and it's bending like this a little bit. So it's like you're looking at like you're in a fish bowl and you're looking at the sky and bends over the top of you like this. And so as you go like this, this is bigger, that smaller. This is bigger, so you're in a fish bowl, so that's spherical. And that's almost 90% of what I shoot fairly standard. And then there's cylindrical and cylindrical is a little bit more. Um, if you will let me show you. If I click on it, everything is going to get taller. Basically, Um, so it's almost like you're a lot further away from something, and you're just There's not as much of, Ah Ben to it. So you can. It's almost like it's way, way out there, and so it doesn't bend as much, but it tends to make everything stretches everything up, which is changes the way it looks. So between the two of these others, the ones you're gonna most often use. And then perspective is really weird because it very rarely comes into play on. And when you click on it, it's going to do funky things to the photograph. Unless it's in a very specific situation, like, let's say I'm doing a panorama down a street and there's a big building here next to me And then there's perspective going all the way down the street, and I panorama that way. If I if I do that, it's going toe, it's gonna recognize that there's that perspective. Otherwise, if you use one of these other ones will try and correct it and do some weird things. But if you're not doing that and you click on it, it's going to do really funky things like it does all sorts of strange stuff to the image. See how it's it's because it's trying to indicate perspective Now, In this case, it's not doing super strange stuff because there's quite a bit of perspective here. Just think of this is the building that sitting next to me, it works okay, but see how it stretches this in order to try and and mimic that, there's something really close to me and I'm trying to create that perspective. I wasn't that close to this altar here, so it does some weird stuff. Sometimes it's pretty interesting what it does. Um, but generally speaking, I'm going to do something either cylindrical E or a spirit Klay. You also have an option to do what's called a boundary warp. So you see all of this area here and over here and there and down here was all created because it ran out of information and it had a warp the image but didn't have any more information out there. So I can grab this boundary warp and I can stretch the image. Just keep stretching until it fills the frame. And usually it does a pretty good job that's stretching it and kind of re manipulating the image to the point that it actually looks quite good, especially landscape wise landscapes. You can't tell if the mountain has adjusted and shifted a little bit. Usually with lines like this, you can see him bowing right up here a little bit. But actually, I think this looks better than the original. If I were just a crop into this one, see how it's kind of skewed this way because I must have been on the wrong side of the building or leaning or something. The other option is if I want to fill those. I can just fill the edges by clicking on this Phil Edge option, and it's just going to fill him with information based on basically on auto. Yeah, that did a pretty good job. I mean, look at that. It did a great job. It assumed that there should be pillars here and here. It assumed that there should be more of these panels here. So it did have really great job down here. It didn't do so good. You can see that it's having a problem with those, Um, but it did pretty well down there. So in most cases, especially on a landscape, especially sky and grass, it does a fantastic job at doing that content aware. Fill outside of the edges. So if you're in a position where you have done an HDR are not in hdr but a panel of a sunset or something like that, and you have extra white space around it, try this fill edge option and it will do a good content aware fill, but for me, I'm just gonna bound reward this thing and it looks pretty good the way it is. Um And then I'm You can also auto crop, and it'll just crop out all that white. But usually you're losing important information, so I'm gonna hit merge on that one. So now we have a panel that we've created, and we have an HDR. But before we leave the concept of HD ours and panels, I need toe show you two things on both of them are pretty critical. So the first thing is, if I click on an image because remember, I've got images that I've loaded in either on my IPad or here on light room desktop and those air high resolution images because the IPad sent the full 30 megapixels up to the cloud and the full 30 pack megapixels down here. Or if I put them in here on their own than their megapixels from my canon five d, mark four. And so all of that stuff is high resolution imagery. But because light room desktop also could receive imagery from Light room classic but light room classic sends it as a smart preview, I could be editing images that are small, raw images instead of big ones. And so if I click on an image and I go to the Info panel, which is way down here in the bottom right hand corner, I'm a click on info. And in that panel you'll see at the bottom is a sink status, and it says it sink and backed up. So I'm all backed up. But notice that it says locally, there's a smart preview in the cloud. It actually has the original file, but I don't have this smart preview. I don't have anything but a smart preview here because I've chosen to, because that little percentage thing that we did in the preferences that says 0% I don't want to store all these images here that tells light room. He doesn't want tohave local images on his on his laptop, and so if I don't have access to that file, I'm not supposed to download it. I'm just supposed to let him see it, and so I can I can right click and ask light room to cut to bring it down. I can actually go to the entire album here and I can right click that, and I can tell it to store the album locally, and that overrides that preference, and it will store the album locally. But right now I have a smart preview. So you have to be aware that if I were to make a, um, hdr of this, I would be making an HDR. That's like maybe 2400 pixels instead of 6000 pixels. Because it's a smart preview. It's a smaller image, so just be aware of that. So what we're gonna do is we're going to do this one, and it's actually a smart previous. Well, eso I'm not gonna actually use this as a final image, you know, for a portfolio piece or something like that. But this is a really interesting panoramic image and the reason It's really interesting, And the reason I'm showing it to you is because it's so nontraditional as a panoramic image. Because I'm not just going like this and taking a picture standing in the same spot. I'm actually on a tram on my way up a mountain, and so perspective is changing. So if you look at this watch, watch what's happening I'm I'm moving down a mountain, so I'm actually moving. So that's me moving. That's not me turning like this. That's just me taking a picture out a window as the tram goes up the mountain. And so if you look at see how the perspective is changing and certain elements are are changing in there. So all of the elements air sliding. So there's parallax happening. And so if you take a picture and you're actually moving up a mountain, it can still stitch a panel. So I'm gonna right click this and I'm gonna do another photo merge and I'm gonna merge this panoramic. And this is absolutely incredible because what it's going to do is it's actually gonna stitch all this together, and it's created something that that almost is impossible to do because it's it's I've actually compared this to just a straight shot. And the the shape of the of the Peninsula here is a little bit off, and the shape of this is a little bit off because it was obscured sometimes and other times not obscured. And so it's kind of manufacturing and saying, What would it look like if all of these were put together and if this wasn't obscured during this moment in the shot, So this is me moving up a mountain and the mountain is closing in on things behind it, and it's still stitched a panel. So this is a fantastic. In this case, I can just use the fill edges and boom, it's gonna fill the sky up here. It's gonna fill down here, see, How did that and it filled the grass there and then Boom, It's perfect. I love it. Although the boundary warp would have done a pretty good job, it's You can see how the background here kind of bows, which is a little weird. So boundary warp oftentimes will help toe remove the Boeing nature of the background. And so probably it's better to do the boundary warp instead of filling it, even though the Phil did a good job and so will hit merge, and now we have another panoramic that we can work on. So before you go into the process of adjusting your images, you've selected him and all you selected him. You selected all of your panels in your HD ours that you wanted to do, and then you're gonna merge them first. In fact, if I were doing a workflow on guy had a bunch of. So I came home from a say, came home from a wedding and I was shooting a wedding, and I had I do about price through for HDR. Is it a wedding? Usually, Um, And then I'll do maybe one panel of, like, the scenery, um, at a wedding. Sometimes I do a panel just because I don't have a wide enough lens for something. So I quickly do a panel, but I'll go through and select it. And while I'm doing that, I select those specific panels and HD ours. And then before I do anything else, I go to the panels in the HD ours, and I merge them so that I have one image to represent them all. And then I go into the process of adjusting. So now we get to go to adjusting. But that is how you make HD ours and panels, and then you need to adjust them