Lessons

Lesson Info

Creating a Raw Panorama

I want to show you the sister issue for HDR, which is Panoramic X. So the panoramic feature is a matter of taking a number of exposures in order to create a more, um, wide visual sense of what you saw in person. We're all familiar with this with our phones now because we can just kind of quickly do, which is amazing. It's just merging them in real time. But there, of course, J pegs and they are smaller and there with a tiny, tiny lens. That's crap. And so we want to take the same thing so constantly, I'm doing an IPhone ah, Panorama toe, look at and share with someone. And then I do the same thing with my camera. If I like it because I put the investment into into the IPhone and then if I like ads, OK, then I just keep moving. But if I like it, then I'll take my camera and say that was a really good panorama. I want to do it. Okay, we're gonna talk about that. So the panorama is comes really useful in an issue, like in a place like this, where you have a 24 millimeter lens. And if you ...

try and shoot the wide shot, you get this. You can't get that whole scene because it's a little too wide and it's too tall. And so I have No, I have no way of getting the scene right. I'm 24 millimeters. I'm trying to get the shot can get wide enough, and if I do get barely wide enough, it's definitely can't get tall enough to get the shot. So I need the height of the camera to be able to get that. Now. The key to a successful panorama is to make sure that your first and foremost exposure you don't actually take it first. But you go to it first is the thing that's critical, which is right for this the middle. So the very middle of this is where I need to know that my height is correct and that my angle is correct. Once I got that, then I need to keep steady and go this way in this way and take a look at the whole thing. I get my sharpness, I get my focus and get everything from this initial middle exposure. Then, once I've got that first initial middle exposure. Correct. And I know exactly what it's gonna be then. And by the way, this is this is gonna look very bright toe to you, for sure, and on the Internet, people are probably looking at that thing. Oh, this is really bright. There's a point to it. The reason I'm showing you a very bright exposure. Number one. If you look at my history, Graham, it's a perfect exposure. It's actually better than a normal exposure because you have more information in the highlights than you do in the shadows. Shadows air, Noisy highlights are full of information, and so I get a better file if I grab. If I If I overexposed by stop, but don't blow anything out and I bring it down, I get a better exposure than if I nailed the exposure in the first place because I have more information to play with. So I prefer slightly brighter exposure if I could get away with it and not blow something out. Um, but the reason I'm showing you one that's not perfectly exposed in the first place is that it doesn't matter what the exposure is before you merge it don't don't Don't work on your photos and then merge. Um, just merge them and then work on the one photo. Okay, So I'm gonna take this entire scene here, and I'm gonna do the entire scene like this. I'm gonna right click it. I'm going to go to photo merge Panorama, And it's going to generate a preview just like it was doing with the HDR. But now, instead of stitching him, one on top of the other is stitching them side by side. Now, while we're talking while we're waiting, let's talk about these three options. The three options are, Well, it's already done. Um spherical, cylindrical and perspective. Think of it as spherical is if you were making a panorama that was like a 3 60 you wanted to be able to look up and down and around and you were inside of a ball and the inside of the ball had your panorama on it so that it looked like you arm or like you are right now you're inside of a sphere and you can look around and that's spherical. So it's trying to replicate that idea. Cylindrical. It's more straight. It's like you're inside of a cylinder that goes straight up and down. It doesn't curve and it's just a flat, right? It's just flat, so you can't look up and down doesn't bend over the top of you. It just goes like this. And then the last is perspective and perspective is tryingto make it seem like there's a perspective to it, so it's gonna take the center one and leave it normal. And then the other ones are supposed to go like this to kind of look like you're looking into something. So that would be more likely useful if you're doing something that actually had perspective to it. Because if I click on it as perspective, it's going to say, Uh, this doesn't make any sense for perspective. I do a cylindrical. It's going to It's going to do something different, but it see how it so it's trying to flatten it out, so there's usually a right and a wrong answer toe the one you choose, and you'll get to know which ones you want to choose and which ones you don't. So this one is definitely a spirit kal situation. Okay, Usually I find that a cylindrical one ISMM or if it's not with a wide angle lens, it's usually with the normal toe long lens because you're further away. So it's almost a straight. Everything looks straight anyway, but if you do wide, it's all bent around you. And so it makes more sense to do the cylindrical. Okay, then you can also auto crop. If you click auto crop, it's gonna get rid of all the white space, so it's going to try and crop within those borders. But before you do that, play with the boundary warp because the boundary warp is actually quite cool. It basically tries to warp the entire scene to get rid of the white. Now see have gone too far, But you can see the bow in the horizon now. But it's kind of cool that it does that, and in some cases it's useful to you. So you kind of bow it back until that looks pretty. You know that that makes sense. Okay, there. So now we've got a panorama that works and we hit Merge! And now it's gonna merge that panorama together, and in the end it's gonna look something like this, right? And and if you go develop module. You can see these are the adjustments that I've made to that final image. So if I were to reset it there, there's that bright exposure that you were just looking at. But all the data is there, and if you look into the actual, uh, information, it's very beautiful file. It's very clean. There's the shadows. Don't have any noise. Not even these deeper shadows here in the river are super clean. So again, I always prefer toe brighten up my exposures of possible if I can avoid if I if I can avoid clipping. But if you're in a really bright situation than oftentimes, you have under expose because the Maurin important exposure is that highlight. If you blow your highlight, it's gone. It's dead, so don't blow your highlights. But if you could brighten it up a little bit and still not blow your highlight, that's the best place to be. Any questions on that? You know, when you're trying to do ah shot like this in your in the field? Would you prefer to use telephoto lens of widening the lens regular lens? I would always prefer to use a telephoto or a normal lens than a wide in this case, like it's just it's colossal. You're sitting on this cliff, and at millimeters, you can't even get the depth and the height, even in a vertical. It's like it's pretty challenging. And so and you always whenever you're doing a panoramic or whenever you're gonna straighten something, you know you're going to use some kind of straightening tool either in light romoeren, Photoshopped you want to shoot wider than the thing itself so that any kind of warping that asked to happen doesn't clip off the edges. And so you're always shooting, trying to shoot as wide as you can. And there's if you back up even an inch from here, then you can't see the river. You can even see right there that I'm I can't see the full river because that's in my way. And so you're trying to, like, hang off the cliff and get as much as you can, um, of the scenario So. But if I could back up from this at all, then I would have used, like, a 35 millimeter of 40 or or 50 or something like that, more normal or The best is when you do a long lens. If you're a long ways away from something and you're doing, like a 200 millimeter or 100 eighties or something like that, then you can just go like this. And it merges really, really well because there's no perspective change. It's funny. I did a, um, I'll show you the shot. I did a here, and this is the best way to see what a panorama is going to kind of look like if you highlight all of your images that you have and go into the in mode if it's not, this is a huge number of panoramic images because it's just it's just a super crowded cemetery right in Prague. But it's like it goes forever and so usually your panoramic like has five or six images, and you can see how it looks right here in the survey mode. So if we were only dealing with, say that many, you kind of get a sense of what that's gonna look like. But when you're dealing with this, many of them, like that's a lot. But I I got the sharpness or the focus from the center. So this is the center image, and I looked for here. This is where I want to have focused. So I made sure that I had focused in the center. Then, in order to get the correct, um, composition, I made sure that I went over to this photograph, which is the edge photograph, and see how it's out of focus. But I needed to make sure that when I got around to it, I would have the correct composition on it. So I go through and I checked this edge. I checked the middle, make sure I focus on the thing that I want the plane that I want focused. And then I checked this edge over here to make sure that it's gonna be right, and I kind of practice that swing, and this is all hand held, so I'm not like swinging it around. I I'm not. They wouldn't let you with a tripod in here, so I'm just and then in the end, this is what it looks like. You can see how I got the edge composition that I wanted here with that tombstone, and then I come all the way across here. But This one's really interesting because as you swing, you're changing the Parallax right? And so we had to do a lot of computing to get this right and each one of those cylindrical spherical they all did something a little different. But interestingly enough, when I use the phone to do the same one as I swung around like that, the parallax changed too much and all the tombstones got skinny. So they were like some of them were disappearing because the parallax is changing. And so they were. They're moving in relationship to each other. And so some of the tombstones that were this wide we're just like a little skinny like polls because it parallax changes. So you have to be careful. The closer you get to something, the more that happens. The further away you get from something, the more natural it's gonna look