Lessons

Lesson Info

Panoramas

And now we're gonna take a look at techniques where we need to think about photo shop at the time, were taking photographs in order to be able to do something special, and they'll be some more standard techniques, like panoramas and HDR. But then we'll look Atmore specialty techniques as well. Let's start off talking about panoramas. Here is a series of images that I captured in Africa, where I have one too three four. It looks like five images, the last to look the same so I could use four images. I'm going to select those four images, and there are two ways of merging this into a panorama. The first method is to go here in Bridge to the Tools menu to choose Futter Shout and a choose photo merge. There's a similar command found in light room. If you go to the photo menu and choose edit in now, if I choose photo merge, I'm presented with this choice and down the left side. I have various methods it could use to distort the individual images to allow them to fit together most the time. ...

You could just use auto as a starting point and only If you disliked the end result, might you try a second time and force it into one of these other choices in the middle? This is just a list of the files you're about to merge together. There's a browse button in case you wanted to ADM. Or but in general, you never need to, because you already selected them within bridge and then down at the bottom. You just need to make sure this check boxes turned on called blend images together, which is what's going to produce a seamless panorama. There is an extra choice at the far bottom called content Aware. Fill transparent areas that any time you stitch a panorama, the end results will not be a perfect rectangle. So by using that choice, it's going to fill any empty areas and turn your end result into a rectangle. And so I might turn that on and that I click OK, and at this point it's coin is used. The load files in the Photo Shop Layers command to stack those images. It's then going to go to the edit menu, and it's going to choose auto align layers, which is going to get them to line up, and then, finally, it's going to go to the edit menu in Choose Auto Blend layers to make that a seamless panorama. It's really a multi step process that that particular choice automates. It's something you could have done yourself using the individual choices. When you're done, you end up with a selection on your picture. That selection indicates the areas that were empty when it was done stitching the panorama because it wasn't a perfect rectangle. So those are the areas where it ended up doing a content aware fill. Now those are the areas that you should be critical of because there's a good chance that there's duplicated content in there. If I look here at the bottom, I can see this area looks like it's been used 12 maybe three times. This little clump of information has been used. 1234 times. Ah, and if you keep looking, you're going to see a lot of repeated content. So that's why they leave that selection visible. So you're aware of which areas will likely have repeated content due to the content aware fill. And in our retouching session, I talked about how I end up, you know, performing general retouching. I could use those skills to further enhance this. Now, if you use that particular choice for stitching your panorama, I would suggest that you adjust your pictures if they were raw files before going through that process. And these images have been pre adjusted, so they look OK if you end up going through that process before adjusting your raw files. The end result here is no longer a raw file in, therefore, the quality of your results. If you adjusted here, are going to be lower than if you made your adjustments beforehand and adobe camera. I'm gonna close this version, and I want to show you a second method for emerging those images. The second method would be to go to the file menu and choose opening camera raw. When you do that, if you have more than one image selected, they show up its thumbnail images on the left side of your screen. And if you go to the little menu that has found just above those thumbnails, you could choose, select all to make sure you work with all the images. Return to the menu and there you're going to find a choice of merged to Panorama. I'll choose down, and when I do it says here, it's Ah, can't find a profile. It is still gonna work if I click OK And now, unlike the first method I used for stitching a panorama here, I get a preview and I have three choices and how it could bend the photos to make them look good. And I could switch to another choice and get an update and then try another choice and see what the differences between them. So instead of just using a setting called Auto and then, you know, trusting the results here, I can try each one of the three options that are there and see which one is best for. This particular image could make this a little bigger by grabbing its corner in expanding it below. That is a choice called boundary warp, and if I bring that up, it's going to warp this image so that it bends the edge of the photograph and stretches it up towards these edges to fill the empty parts. So as I bring up Boundary wrote Warp, you'll see the edge of the photo pushing closer and closer to be in a rectangle. Once you get it all the way up, it will be a nice rectangle. But you have to make sure that that distortion added by warping is not, you know, distorting the image and undesirable way. So sometimes it's very desirable because of the way it was previously bent. And other times it's not. The other choice you have is instead of distorting it in those areas to fill it in. There's a check box here called Phil Edges, and if I turn on Phil Edges, then it's going to do a content aware fill on those areas and just like we did when we used the other version. And then if I turn that off, there's also another option down here called Auto Crop in auto crops not gonna distort or fill anything. It's just gonna try to produce the largest rectangle of continuous image out of what your results look like. So if I turn on auto crop, you won't see those empty areas. So if you try this and you never saw empty areas the entire time, your image looked like a rectangle. It probably meant that auto crop was already on, because unless that's on, then changing this, you don't see the checkerboard that's out there. So for this particular image, I think it's fine to crop in on it. So I just turn on auto crop. Finally, there's a check box here called Apply Auto Settings, and that does the same thing as going into adobe camera and clicking the auto button. Which makes it so. If your image look dull because it hasn't been adjusted previously, it might look better than most of the time. I don't have that on because I like to adjust my images from scratch. Uh, in I don't like to trust that necessarily. But what's special about this is when I hit the merge button, it's going to ask me where to save the resulting file. I click save, and then it will show up here in the bottom of the camera on window. But what's very special about it is it's still a raw file. If you started with Ron Data rob images, the end result is wrong, and that means that there's no quality difference when it comes to adjusting this image here in camera, you can either just work with unadjusted pictures stitched him into a panorama, and after you're done, start adjusting. Whereas the other method that I showed you, I would suggest you pre adjust the images because the end result is not a raw file, and you only get the highest quality out of your images if you're really getting full use out of that broad data. So it's nice. Build a stitch, especially a really wide panorama first before adjusting it, because it's often hard to judge exactly how bright it should be if it varies across that panorama. So I'm gonna click done now, and that will be my stitched panorama. Now I gotta warn you when shooting panoramas, because I've had some issues in the past that I really wish you would have learned earlier on. And that is if the image like this one, I'm in Africa and I have a really long lens. Don't recall which one it was, but it might have been a 500 millimeter. Let's see if I can find out. No, it doesn't show me here, but I'm assuming I'm using a 500 millimeter lens and I get in on an elephant on the left side of my frame. Shoot it, move over. Leave about 1/3 overlap between the last shot I took in the next. Take another shot. Repeat, repeat, repeat until I make it all the way across. Well, if you're ever using a longer lens, be very careful, because the longer the lens you have, usually the narrower the depth of field is, and therefore the more critical. Your focus point ISS. Because, as I'm panning across here, there might be an elephant in the frame for almost all of those shots. But that one shot near the left side, where there's a gap between the elephants. If it's auto focusing in every shot, then it might focus on what's in the background. And if I'm using a long lens that has a narrowed up the field, Suddenly the area that is sharp might end up shifting dramatically. Mick and still stitched the panorama. But it's just not gonna look good. You're going to suddenly look across there and notice that the sharp area suddenly shifts, and so I usually have a button on the back of my camera that is, can lock the focus or on my lens. There's a button on the lens itself. I can press to lock the focus and any time and doing a panorama. There's actually two buttons I'm holding in. The one of the The lens itself locks the focus, so it's not gonna focus between each shot and then in the back of the camera as an E L button. That's auto exposure lock, and I'm holding it in a swell, and that makes it so. As I go across my panorama. The focus point is the same, and the exposure is the same all the way across, and that's going to ensure you get higher quality results. Now we can stitch panoramas even if we use a fisheye lens and a fisheye, plans would really bend things. That's an example. In order to stitch a fisheye, you select the images, and I believe we must use the first method that I showed you, which is this one called photo merge. And if you have a fish eye lens that was used, you gotta turn on some extra features. When you're in here, be sure you use auto. I believe it will only work if you use auto, then be sure to turn on the to middle check boxes that are here. The geometric distortion correction is what's going to correct for your fish eye lens, and without that turned on, this will likely not work. And then it's optional if you want it to fill the empty areas or not. But I'm gonna click, OK, and now you'll see that hopefully it will be able to stitch multiple fisheye images together, and it did. The area that selected is the area that would usually be empty. That's where it used content aware fill. Now I know it still has a lot of distortion. You see that curved horizon line? Well, you can go in here in use the same techniques that I showed you in a different lesson. That's part of the complete guide, which was I came in and talked about using filters, and one of the filters we used was called Adaptive wide angle. And with that filter, I can come in here and attempt to straighten various areas in my photograph and try to get rid of as much distortion as is practical. And here I'm not being careful cause I'm not zoomed in it all, But this might give you the sense that some of those techniques could be useful with fish. I panoramas