Lessons

Lesson Info

The Warp Tool

What I'm gonna do next is I'm gonna show you how, practical application wise, you could be doing things with things like panoramas. And after you stitch a panorama sometimes you get some funky correction, some funky things that happen in the distortion that you can't fix with any of the automated things. So even something like adaptive wide angle is not gonna help you out very much here. These are instances where you're gonna have to do things manually and you have to go in manually. Now, one of the things I did not show when we talked about Adobe Camera Raw was I did not show how to do a panorama. So I'm gonna include that in this so that you can see what happens with something like one of my favorite things which is called a vertical panorama. So I'm gonna grab all of these and then I'm gonna go ahead and click on this, drag them into Photoshop so that they open up in Adobe Camera Raw. And this is what's called a vertical panorama. This is a panorama that you start basically from the...

floor and you take pictures all the way up to the ceiling. And to do this, you really wanna make sure that you're moving a third of the way into the frame every single time so that you're basically leaving about two thirds of that content as fresh content with each time you're going up. So what you can see here is this is shooting some benches. I love doing this in churches, especially old, gothic churches, you could create some of the most amazing images from those churches. So we'll start at the benches here, click here and I see that I went from basically shooting from the pews up a little bit and then up a little bit more and then up a little bit more until I reached the ceiling. Now when you're building panoramas, it's always good to have at least anywhere from one third to half of that frame being fresh every single time. Some people might tell you 10-20% but if you really wanna give Photoshop or Adobe Camera Raw a break, you give it a little bit more information than 10% or 20% when you're adding in your panoramas. The difference between this panorama and let's say a horizontal panorama is that a horizontal panorama you might tilt your camera vertically and shoot this way. Whereas this, you keep your camera horizontal to shoot vertical. And you can take anywhere from five to seven to 10 different images to do this. What we're gonna do is we're gonna grab the bottom, grab the top, press and hold shift, and then we're gonna go into right here there's a little dropdown icon. Say merge to panorama. It might give you a little error that says it's not able to automatically select a valid lens profile. If you wanna continue it's kinda up to you. Just go ahead and press OK, that does happen every once in a while. And it's gonna start building a panoramic preview for you of this. Now what it's doing with this is it's taking all of your image and it's doing a lot of the manual, it's doing a lot of that transformation for you and it's doing it manually to put all of those different images together and stitch them together. Now we have a couple different selections here. We have spherical, we have cylindrical, and we have perspective. Sometimes perspective won't necessarily work, especially if we're doing something like this, so I tend to stay within either spherical or cylindrical. I like the cylindrical look. If we go ahead and move the boundary warp over to the right, you can start to see all the area that it's cutting off on the sides. That's where Adobe Camera Raw's gonna automatically start filling those spots in so you get a bigger image. Because if we just leave this like this, it's gonna be a really skinny photograph and it's not gonna be a very compelling panorama. So if we move this over to about right there, that looks much better. A little bit of a wider format. Press merge. So it's doing a lot of that stuff for you, all the manually filling in of all the stuff on the sides that when we clicked on the extra stuff it's filling in those sides for you when you do that boundary warp. But it's gonna need to save this as its own file so it wants you to save it as a DNG file so you're basically creating your own digital negative from a series of four negatives. And you go ahead and press save. And there it will build that preview for you of what that image looks like and that's the stitched version of all of these images here. Now there's a lot of its own perspective warping going on, there's a lot of stuff that's happening, all the stuff that we've already talked about. Photoshop and Adobe Camera Raw working together trying to stitch all that stuff together but it's not always gonna be perfect. So typically with these, I'm even on a tripod, I'm tripod mounted. I've got it restricted so that my camera can only move up and down. Even though I've got it restricted so my camera can only move up and down, what I'm doing there is I'm trying to make sure that I'm causing any of that warping to happen as I'm building the images for this panorama. But what you can see across the top is that we still have this side and this side are not exactly perfect even though I went through and I did it really tediously to try and make it perfect. So with this set as a DNG, we can go ahead and just set the settings to auto just to get us into Photoshop here and I'll press open image. Once I open this up in Photoshop, I want to warp it in a way that it's a custom warp, essentially, we're not doing the lens corrections 'cause the lens corrections won't work here. 'Cause what's happening is this side of the image is being pulled in this way more so than this side of the image is. So there's another kind of warping tool that we have here that doesn't do anything automatically for you. It's not a lens correction, it's not an adaptive wide angle. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna press control and space bar and zoom out a little bit by going to the left. And I'm gonna go into a tool that's called the warp tool. So I'm gonna go to edit, I'm gonna go to transform, and I'm gonna go to warp. So when I look at this, the way warp works, it looks like your typical, when you press command or control T and you transform your image that way, doesn't it? We've already done a lot of transformation by the way, that's one thing I didn't miss to say. When we were working with shapes and text and any time I press the command or control T that's getting me into some form of transformation, which is typically gonna be a freeform transformation. This looks and appears like it would be a freeform transformation 'cause we get the same grid lines and we get the same handles on the sides. The difference between this is that we have these little individual handles that appear inside the line from one handle at the top to the handle at the bottom. And what these are is these are like perspective warping or custom warping I should say paddles that when you pull them to the left, it will pull the image in just in that one spot but also look at what's happening in the rest of the image, and manipulate it around it or pull it to the right. So when you pull those out from the sides, it's gonna make your image wider, it's basically gonna pull the whole thing and warp it out to the right hand side. If we were to grab the top, again, pull it up or pull it down. It's gonna do some weird things if you pull it down and you commit to that so I wouldn't do that. Command or control Z will automatically reset those. Ctrl+alt+Z will reset the one on the right hand side. If you grab a corner and move a corner at this point, notice how it's not moving like the regular free transform did. The free transform, if we grabbed that corner and we moved it in, it would do some time of perspective transform or maybe make that image smaller. If we were pressing shift and alt it would center it down from, it would shrink it from the center. So if I click this and move this over to here, you can start to see what I'm doing is I'm grabbing the edge of the inside of that archway and pushing it up to the edge of the image. And you can guess what I'm gonna do on the other side, grab this one and do the same thing right to about there, right about there. I might even grab this one and go a little bit further over so that I get those lines right there to match up perfectly. Now what happens in the center of the warp is if you grab in the center of the warp and you move it around, it will warp the image from the center. Something like that or bow it out. So you can see here this is not like any of the lens corrections that we've looked at in the past because those lens corrections that we looked at in the past will allow us to basically move equally as we change that barrel distortion. This does not let you move equally as you move that distortion. If I move this on this side of the image, it's just moving it on the side of the image, it's not creating that kind of barrel warp that we would create if we were using something like a lens correction tool that has that barrel distortion fix that we saw before. So that would be, I wouldn't wanna do this to this image, I'm just showing you what happens if you click from the inside of that. And it's hard to get it back once you make that decision, you're kinda stuck with it, it's hard to get it back to where it was before. So it's something we definitely would not wanna do with this photograph. So I'm gonna go ahead and exit out of here and if we press escape it will not commit it. Again, if you wanted to go back to it you go to edit, transform, and then warp. And again, I'll just grab this in the upper right hand corner, get that warped right to about there. I like the way that looked right there. And then warp that over to there. So then if we take a look at the photograph though, if we actually like zoom in here and look at what's happening within the image, it doesn't look like much has really changed. But all we've done is because we have a lot of symmetry here is we've just made that a little bit more symmetrical. These vertical panoramas are a lot of fun. I highly suggest that if you're gonna be doing these you definitely do them when you're tripod mounted. Move from the bottom, work your to the top. Give yourself between 30 to 50% extra space between images so that it makes Photoshop a little bit, gives it a little bit more room to work with. But they do create a very warping perspective in themselves. So what a vertical panorama is it's not really natural anyway so it's gonna have this kind of warping, kind of bowing thing going on there. If you're in something like the Notre Dame, it can really make that thing look awesome with all the gothic architecture just forcing you right into the center of the image. It's just a really nice artistic kind of panorama to do that's different than the traditional okay, move left to move right. This is a vertical panorama, it creates some really interesting things inside churches.