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Lesson Info

Panoramas

very much like merging an HDR image. You also have the ability inside of light room to merge a panorama, and that makes it really simple for people when they're out in the field. And I do this all the time when I just don't have enough wide enough lens to take the shot or when I want it to be a much higher resolution, I just simply turn my camera vertical. So if I wanted a oh nice wide pan or a wide shot of the mountain and I don't have a wide enough lens, I just turned my camera vertical and do a Siris of shots, so I'll start over on the left and just Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam! Like this. What I'm going to do in order to create a good panorama image is you're going toe overlap each image by about a third. So if you've shot this segment, then you want toe overlap it by a third so that there's a third overlap on every frame, and that gives the the computer enough information to find the commonalities and merge those together. So make sure that if you're gonna make a panorama that you're g...

iving at least a third of the image of overlap between the two images. Now, to make a panorama, you don't necessarily have to go from left to right. You can go from right to left, and you don't even have to go right to left or left to right. You can also go up to down or down, toe up. You could go like this and you can even do a grid. You could do, you know, three shots here and then three shots here and then three shots here. And as long as all of those overlapped by about a third light room will actually go through and stitch the whole thing together in one big square. So, uh, it's just really It should be called stitching photos rather than Panorama because it's not just a panoramic image. It's the ability to stitch all of the images together with their commonalities into whatever shape it ends up being. But we're going to show you how to do that right now, Um, in our circumstance, we shot this mountain. It's a very wide long mountain. And so I did a panorama. How many images is this? 123456 There's 12, like 20 images, so I'm going to right click, and I'm going to go to photo merge. Same place that we go hdr and I'm gonna go to panoramic merge. Now, before I close here, I want you to see that not only can you do a panoramic merge and an HDR merge, but you can also do an HDR panorama emerge. So if you have a really hard situation where there's a way high, dynamic range and you still want a panorama, just take each frame of that. Panoramic is HDR, so it shoots the three shots, then overlapped by a third. Three shots overlapped by a third. Three shots overlapped by a third three shots. And then you just highlight all of that together and say hdr panorama emerge and it will do all of it and it will take a while, but it will do it. So let's do this panoramic merge by simply clicking on Panorama emerge. It's gonna ask us some questions over here and this thes air some, uh, interesting ways that you could merge. If you look at the top one, it's spherical, and I like the pictures that they show, but basically spherical. You can think of it as, um, you're inside of a of a sphere. You're inside of a ball and you're looking and you're spinning around it, and the image is gonna wrap on the inside of that ball. What does that look like? So the sky bends up above you. The ground bends down below you. It's the most common version of stitching that you will dio. Then there's cylindrical and cylindrical is like You are in a cylinder, there's no top and there's no bottom. All it is is just a cylinder, and you're inside that, and so there's no bending at the top, and there's no bending at the bottom. That usually is best for a shot where you're a long way away from the thing. And so there's not kind of like that sky going over the top of you. And there's not ground coming under the you. So in our case, cylindrical is actually better, because we are quite a ways away from that mountain. And so there's nothing over us and under us, so we don't want it to bend necessarily. And then there's perspective and perspective is when you're shooting something that's on an angle or when you're shooting a city street, you know where there's those severe angles. The computer has to account for that, and so it's going to count for it and recognize that it's okay for something to be very large. That's close to me and very small. That's far away from me. But you're going to see that if I use perspective on a shot that has no perspective. Has to do some weird, screwy things to it in order to account for the fact that it thinks there's some kind of perspective it play, and so it's usually gonna wreck your shot. Eso You can try it out and see what it does. But really, that's meant for when you're in a situation where you literally do have some pretty serious perspective and you're doing a panorama. Now you'll notice that once you've chosen a method for the projection, then you're also going to see that it kind of has toe bend the image a little bit, and there's gonna be white areas on the top, the bottom, the sides of the left. Andi. That's just because it's warping those images in order to fit them all together. And so this area here, you can do two different things with it. The first thing you could do is what's called a boundary warp, and I'm going to just simply warp the boundaries and stretch that image until it fills in all that white space. And that usually works just fine. There's almost there's very few cases where that doesn't work superbly, Um, but the other option is toe fill the edges. And what light room is going to do is it's actually going to take content aware fill, and it's going to use that to fill in the edges and on a blue sky that's gonna work perfectly. And even down here on this foreground, which is just desert that's gonna work. Aziz Well, So I'm going to click on Phil edges, and it's just gonna fill in those edges those white edges, and it'll do a pretty dang good job. You might have to go in after the fact and do a little bit of spot touching or something toe kind of fix it. But usually it's pretty spot on. Unless there's something seriously, you know, difficult to copy. That's right next to the edge, so that worked out really well. And then, of course, there's the apply auto edit settings aan den. Oh, there is one other way that you can deal with it. If you don't fill the edges, you can also auto crop it, and it'll just crop off all of those white edges as well. But I think we're going to do the fill edges, and we're gonna merge this file. So now it's going to take all of the images. It's gonna stitch them together, and it's going to create a massive raw file. And this is very different than a panorama that you might stitched together in a plug in, because those are going to be, uh, pixel based files after the merge of the Panorama. Um, what your experience now here is going to be is that you're stitching together all these raw images into a big, massive, raw image, so it's going to be a very large file, but it's going to be able to be treated as a raw file, and that's the way I wanna work on my raw, panoramic image. I want I want. I want all the data and so it's going to be big, but it's gonna be really awesome toe work on now. The same is true of an HDR. When you emerge in HDR inside of light room, you're merging your raw images in tow. One very deep, massively large HDR raw image. And when you merge a set of panoramas that are also HDR, then it's even bigger than that. So these could get to be very massive files on DNA now because it's a raw file, I can get in here and darken it down a little bit. I come into the color and I could take this. It needs toe not be so orange. I'm gonna take the orange down quite a bit. That is more natural. That's more like the desert that we actually know and love. It's very yeah, foreboding, and I'm also going to go to the effects panel, and I'm going to work on the clarity a bit, and I'm going to go back to the light panel and bring down the blacks just a little bit. Bring up the shadow so that I could see into those shadows. Just a tad Onda Oh, in the effects, texture is a really great way toe work. So I'm gonna bring up the texture on, you know, rocks and trees and things like that. It's really great to have all that extra texture in there, So I've got that extra texture. Now, I'm gonna go into the cropping tool, and I'm just gonna tilt that thing because that mountain looks like it's kind of falling over. So we're gonna tilt the mountain a bit. We're gonna bring in the edges here, remember, it's a panorama. So I don't have to keep a certain, uh, you know, aspect ratio to this thing. Just looking for the absolutely best version of this image that I could find. And that looks about right. So there we go. I like the way that looks. There's only one problem with this image. Well, it's It's kind of a boring image, and most of the reason it's boring is because, well, it just has nothing in the sky. It's It's a very bland sky. I like the shadows that we've got going on in the mountain, but I'm not a big fan of what's you know what the being so at the at the foreground. So I'm gonna take the Grady int, and I'm just gonna burn the foreground a little bit so that it's not quite so bright. And I think that helps the shot quite a bit so that the rial information is up here. So I'm just using the hell tool to get rid of some of these. Like that water tank that was there. Not a big fan of this house. I'm gonna try and get rid of this house. And I could I could work on all of these, But I'm just looking for the eyesores right now, so just move over here. There we go. See, that looks a little bit better without all the eyesores. Less attention attracted to, you know, things in the foreground. And there's a big telephone pole sticking out right there. So I'm going to draw a line on that There. That's a lot better. Okay, so now we have a it's it's better. It's still not perfect, but it is better. I'm still gonna play around maybe with the actual underlying color information. So I'm going to go into my adobe rot and just look at the different options here. Well, I like the landscape that that tends to help a little bit. But now I'm gonna have to go back from here and go to the color and just take the saturation down a little bit. Actually, maybe I just need to take the saturation of certain colors, so I think it's kind of a boring image. It's not all that interesting, but we did show you how to create a panoramic image in light room, and sometimes we fail, and sometimes we succeed on an image. But that's how you create a panoramic image inside of light room. And then our next goal is to see if we can do something to this image that we can't do inside of light room. And so we're going to teach you how to take an image to Photoshop.