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Difficult Panoramas Part 1

All right, let's get any other things because, um, a star isn't always what we need. Let's say we need to do the one other thing related HDR, and that is an HDR panorama. We got a panorama. We want to shoot HDR. So first you need to lock your exposure so that the exposures consistent across all of these on the back of my canon, there's a button. It's called E L. Uh, is what it says on a Nikon. I think, on a Canada actually looks like an Asterix, a little star like icon. If you press it, it means lock the exposure. Keep the exposure consistent. Across the next series of images that I shoot well, you can still use exposure. I'm sorry, auto bracketing when that's turned on. So I hit the little button on the back of my camera, which means keep my exposure consistent. Then I take one Siri's Click Click Click For the first part of my panorama, rotate a little press again, click, click, click, wrote a little click, click, click and keep doing that until I make it across the scene, just making...

sure my exposures walked. Then what do I do. Then I take each Siris of three shots and emerge them. So I take the first. Here's the 1st 1 on here. One shot, two shots, three shots I select them in. Emerged to HDR pro when I merge to HDR Pro Kimmel. You remember there was a check box that said Finish processing in camera, Whatever that was called. I actually have that turned off And what I dont hear complete tone toning in hdr Turn that off click. OK, it'll end up giving me a file that I would save in tiff file format tiff file format. So when this is done, I would do save as I do tiff file format and I repeat that process for each one of the little slivers of the scene that I captured. I've already done that. So for each series of three, I have a tiff file, um, in the same folder. I'll grab those right now just looking for tiff files in here for every three shots, there should be one to file. Then I opened those in camera so the resulting image is opening camera. Now I can come in and act like it's any normal panorama where I pick the most important part of the scene. And before I move the adjustment sliders over here, I hit the select all button. So any change that I make happens consistently across those images. These images actually already been processed. I'll go to the default so you can see what it looked like if I hadn't already moved the sliders. So you see the highlight detail. You can't see what's out the window out there after you can see what's out the window. That's it with stuff. Then I can take those images after they have already been processed, and I can stitch them as a panorama. Same way you'd stitching normal panel. So it's kind of Ah, weird process. You first take those three shots, merging his HDR, save the end result of a tiff. Do that for the next set of three shots. Mercy them, save it as a tiff. Do for the next set of three emergent save it is a tiff. Then you grab all the tiff files you just made and you adjust them all together so they get the same settings by choosing opening camera and before you make any change in camera. You hit the select all buttons, so it affects all the pictures. You can optimize them as much as you want, and finally, when you're done, you can go to the tools menu. Choose photo shop, and there's the normal choice called photo Merge, which means stitch them into a panorama. Once you've done that in you crop, the end result, you will have an HDR panorama, but it takes a lot of work and thinking about it. But it can be rather interesting, because usually I wouldn't be able to see outside the windows in here. This is a crazy place right here. This is in Singapore, and when you go to a botanical garden there, it's a little different than usual. There's, like a what, 12 through about a six story tall waterfall in there, and there's all sorts of other interesting stuff, All right, so let's talk about other things other than HDR. Let's talk about Panorama is in general. See what we got here for examples. Sometimes I find that if I grab some images to stitched together, sometimes it has an issue. For instance, here's a panorama that I took Here are the individual shots. Uh, the all these little orange things that you see in the scene are temples. Mentally try to count how many temples you see. This is a place called Begun. It's in Miramar. And there are, if I remember right, 2200 temples and square miles. It's crazy, and it's really hard to capture s anyway, that I went through the beginning of this twice. Anyway, that's Panorama. When I stitched that, all I did was I selected all the images I chose opening camera. And before I moved any sliders, I hit the select all button, which means affect all these images. Then I selected those images. Chose tools Photoshopped photo merge. When photo merge came open like this, I just used the auto setting and I clicked. Okay, I'm not gonna make you wait, because those are a lot of pictures, so let's see if I can find where is Here it is. Here's what the end result looked like. Instead of stitching it all together into one continuous panorama, it ended up delivering. This is my end result. That's not what I expected. So let's look at how can we fix that if you ever stitch a panorama and instead of coming in is one piece. It comes in his multiple strips. It can happen when you're done stitching a panorama. It's going to keep each individual shot you had as an individual layer, and it uses a mask toe limit where each shot is showing up here, it looks to me like we have three strips of panorama. Look fine individually. We just need to somehow combine them together. The first thing I'm going to dio is simplify it. So if I look at my layers panel, I can tell where each strip is, because if you look at the thumbnails in the layers panel, can you see that they progressively move towards the right? The little preview, the little chunk of darkness that's in there so that this has got to be one strip of the panorama. Then the next one starts way with left again, the little dark chunk, and it's only got two pieces here, and then it starts to the left again, and you can see it progressively moving over. That means that it's, I think, that from the top one, Teoh here is one of those strips that looks good. I think the second strip is just these two layers put together. And I think the third strip is all of these put together. All I'm doing is looking at the dark little mass that's in each thumb now, and I can see him progressively moving towards the right in. That means that's one chunk. So I'm gonna take this set right here. Select them, will go to the layer menu, and I will choose merge layers. Merged layers means merged layers that currently have selected. Let's see if I was right, that all of those layers that I had selected was one of these little strips will turn off its eyeball. It was a bottom one. Then, looking in my layers, it looks like just these two layers go together because then suddenly it pops back to the left. It doesn't progressively move to the right, so I'll take those to the keyboard. Shortcut for merged layers is command E. Then I'll grab the next Siri's whenever it starts on the left and just progressively moves to the right. They're probably together. So I typed Command E, which is the same as going to the layer menu in choosing merged layers. Now let's see if I successfully combined those into just now three separate layers. Here's one. There's one and there's one. Yes, I did. If I didn't do it right, I would notice two of these people pieces disappearing at the same time because they would have been, uh, I would have merged to many of those together. There's another way to deal with that. If you're not very good at looking in the Layers panel to determine what layers those were on, I'll choose Undo to undo that. So I get back to all of these. Here's the other way you could do it where you could be sure, if you're not good at looking at those tiny little thumbnails, I could grab the move tool. And if you move the move tool so you're on top of the checkerboard out here. When there is no picture, there's a trick. If you hold on the command key and click when you're on top of the checkerboard, that's the control, came Windows. You're gonna create this little rectangle, and when you drag any layer that touches that rectangle will become selected. So watching my layers panel is a drag this way, and I let go right like that. It just selected all of the layers that touched that rectangle, and so that should be all those layers that make up that strip. I could go to the layer menu and choose merge layers to combine this. Then I could do the same thing again. I hold on the command key. I click out here where it looks like a checkerboard drag across those, then merged layers. And then here it's hard to get to a spot where it's checkerboard. But I could go to the lower right, get the command key and then drag get all those. So if you really hate looking at the little tiny thumbnails have, it's hard for you to figure out which of these layers makes up one of those strips. You could do it that way. Now I want to reposition these where I think they need to go, and so if I look at it, there's no mountains whatsoever on the left side of this bottom strip comes over here, keeps going, and then suddenly the mountains start. So I'm going to use the move tool and make that layer active. I think I already have it active. If I just turn this layer on and off, I can confirm that. And I'm just gonna use the move tool and move it over like this. So we're going to start where those mountains are. Now, get aside. Which of these two, uh, is the proper 12? Next. Be in there. It's usually gonna be the one directly above it. I'm gonna make that active by clicking on my layers panel. Bring it down like that. I'll click on the next one and use the move to old. Move it down. Now we need to look a little closer to make sure that things were gonna line up right. What? This is usually caused by. The reason why it fails to stitch these together is when I was swinging my camera around to do this panorama on two of them, I swung too far. Instead of having like 1/4 image overlap or half image overlap, I had either nothing or just the tiniest bit where it couldn't have enough to line it up. So I look in here for any common features and I don't see the same content repeated. So I think I swivelled my camera is simply too far, and I got no overlap at all. So I'm gonna make that layer active. Look, it's the middle one here moving around, and I'm going to see if I can figure out where I think it would naturally want to be here, looking at the shape of the mountain, moving it up or down to get it to looking at both the horizon line, which is here in the edge of the mountain, which is there to see. Do I need to move this down or up and then see if I can figure out when I go here? There's a tiny little not shut the top of the mountain where it suddenly looks like it's lower. So I think I need to move it further to the right so that there'd be space for that mountain Teoh transition. I didn't mean to zoom out like that. Okay, Now, to get rid of that gap, what do I dio? Well, one of two things you can do, one is you can use the spot healing brush, get a brush just a little bit wider than the gap and what I would usually dio is with a spot healing brush, which is the one that looks like a Band Aid with a dotted line behind it is that we click right at the very top where the to join, just click and let go. And then you're gonna hold down the shift key, and you're gonna click at the bottom where the to touch and it's going to paint across that for you. But before you dio, we probably want to do this on its own layer in case I screw up. So let me do this again. I'm gonna put a new layer on top of our layer stack. Just click on the new layer icon at the bottom of my layers panel, and whenever you use a tool on an empty layer, you need it. Go to the top of your screen. And if there's a choice called sample all layers, it needs to be turned on. Otherwise it can only look at one layer, which is a layer that's active. That layer doesn't contain anything, so it wouldn't really do anything, but with sample all layers turned on, it can copy from the other layers. I'm gonna now try it out. I'm gonna click right where the gap is at the very top. Hold down the shift key and I'll click at the very bottom right where the gap is. It just painted across the entire gap. And right now it's thinking, trying to figure out what would go there in it ended up filling that in. Sometimes I need to find, too, in the end result, if it's a sky, I usually needed a huge brush and paint across a relatively wide with its blue sky or just solid colored sky. And the wider I paint across the wider it's gonna blend the colors. It's gonna blend all the way from out here to all the way over there. Whereas if I painted just a tiny area like I had done previously, uh, it doesn't have very much space to make it fade out here. I can still see the tiniest line. I'm not sure if you can, but I'll just click there one more time. I look at any of the details in here and see if it looks odd anywhere, and if it does, just paint across the area again to see if it will do a better job. Then I could move to the next one. Here's the other gap. I'll do the same thing. We need to find the layer that contains this part. That's over on the right. I can just look at my layers panel. The part that's furthest over on the right is that one, and I look at it and I see the horizon line and the mountain looks too high on the one on the right. So I used my move tool. The arrow keys on my keyboard could be used to nudge it around. Looks like the horizon line is that approximately the correct height Now and now. I need to see if there's anything we can use to line this up. Do you see this diagonal line in the mountains? I think I see the same diagonal line of mountains here. That's what's gonna tell me when I get this far enough away. If I just nudge this up, do you see how it looks like a broken edge? If you just visualize this continuing over, I need to move this to the right. Tell that line would be appropriate. Somewhere around there, I think. Does that look like it would be able to continue through it? Now I'm gonna do the same thing. I mean again, get my spot healing brush. I mean, again, work on that new layer that's up on top. That was empty at one time. And I'm gonna get a brush just big enough to cover that gap. Click on the top of the gap. Hold down the shift key. Click on the bottom of the gap. It's gonna try to figure out what to Dio. I'm sure I'm gonna have to touch it up in a few areas. See if I did. Okay, that edge looks somewhat. Okay. I might need to get a smaller brush. And if I choose undo, You can see it. Put some weird material in right about there. So if there's anything looks odd just over it a second time. Sometimes you have to do It's a manual retouch, but most the time I find the spot healing brush. I can handle a lot of it in the areas. Look weird paying across him again. It's when you get really close to specific detail, like the edge of this temple that you might have to manually grab from other parts of the photograph to retouch it in, like right there. Where? I don't know if that's appropriate to have grass between temple pieces. So with this tool, I can do it anywhere where it just looks kind of generically wrong. And then if there's a part like this, I might have to switch to a different tool like the clone stamp. Come in here and just blatantly tell it. Copy. From here in this one, just like the other tool I have to tell it to work on all the layers. Okay, Now I can come over here. All right? I'm gonna manually fill that in whatever it takes. But you get the idea eso I need to do those gaps. Just remember, with skies, your usually gonna have to go across a wide area because right now I can see a little bit of a line right here because the brightness of the sky suddenly goes little darker over here. With that, get a bigger brush, go across a wide area. If you find even when you do this, the end result doesn't look smooth. Then you would need to work in 16 bit instead of eight because they affords mawr brightness levels for it to be able to do a smooth blend. Come on. With this huge oven image, you can take a bit of time. In case you don't know, this image is, uh, 980 megabytes in size, so it's ah, pretty big file. But as we're waiting for this toe, Teoh complete its little passion. We have a question. Your, uh, actually taking the picture. Is there an optimal amount of overlap that you, I would say, overlap a minimum of 1/4? And ideally, depending on what's in the scene, you can up overlap up to 1/2. It really depends on what's in the scene once I'm done with this, since parts of this image go beyond the bounds of the document because I moved them over there, there's two commands I'm going to use. One is to go to the image menu and choose reveal all, which will make the document larger to include any information that's going beyond the edges. Because when I repositioned these, they went beyond the edge. Now I can see the full length the 2nd 1 is one that's called trim trim will remove the empty space from the document, effectively cropping out the parts of the document. Don't contain anything. I went to the edit. Our image menu chose trim, and then I would have to use the crop tool. Teoh. Crop it down toe to, ah, pure image. So sometimes you need to fill in the gaps. Win Futter shot or when you screwed up and you ended up doing your panorama and you swung too far on each one. And that gives you some idea how you can end up trying to accomplish that, lining up manually and then passionate by itself with this one, I think the sky didn't end up being perfectly smooth where I wanted across it. And if that's ever the case, then you want Teoh merger images together in 16 bit mode instead of eight bit. If you're not familiar with that, then what you would do is when you're in camera at the very bottom of your screen is where it tells you what you're about to use. You see here it says eight bit, eight bit. It's fine for most things, but on occasion, if you need to retouch a sky in a panorama that will be need to be set to 16 to set it. You just click on that text and they'll be a pop up menu right here. That means give me mawr brightness levels in this image more than there usually needed. And it makes for a larger file. But it allows you when you re touching the sky to get a smoother end result. So I'd first try it. And if it didn't look good, then I would switch this over to 16 bit in research it. All right. Ready? Yeah. This is from Richard W. What is your thinking regarding applying lens and chromatic aberration corrections before emerging to HDR or to panoramas already measured with HDR? The chromatic aberrations absolutely always turn on because they can be exaggerated when it comes to HDR. So I always do Chromatic aberration. Ah, lens corrections. It's not a bad thing to do that before stitching a panorama just because if you're lenses bending elements because it's distorting them like a fish eye lens conduce it. It's just a wide angle lens would do the same. Thing is, to a lesser extent, it'll still curve things. It's nice to correct for it beforehand before you stitch them. Great and photo maker would like to know for the Temple Panorama. Do you recommend using anti vignette ing during the Photoshopped image stitching process to avoid problems with exposure in this guy? Yes, that would be another good thing. So in general, when you're about to stitch a panorama, you can select your images type command art, open them in raw and before you end up moving into the sliders, hit the select all button. And what they're talking about is if you come over to the lens town, turn on remove chromatic aberration and under this area called profile, turn on enable lens profile corrections and that will make sure that you correct for distortion in your lens and also you correct for the corners. Being a little bit darker on your images, it will make it so you're stitching. A panorama will be easier to have a smooth looking and result. And as you see here, if I open any of the images that I stitch, they already have the chromatic aberration turned on, and they already have that turned on as well