Lessons

Lesson Info

Photoshop: Panorama Stitching

when shooting panorama is just a couple tips we need the exposure to be consistent because if the sun is blatantly in her picture in one shot and the sun is not in the shot somewhere else your exposure meter is going to pick up the difference in brightness between those two shots you're gonna get radically different brightness is between them so we need to either be in manual mode or turn on exposure lock on my camera on the back of the camera have a cannon five the mark three there is a button on the back that looks like an ass tricks like a little kind of star like looking thing and if I press it it locks the exposure so I could be in programme mode I could be an aperture priety mode be whatever mode I like and if I press that button until I press it again it's gonna lock the exposure and therefore if I go across the panorama the exposure would be consistent it's not going very because otherwise of its varying all the time it's going to be very difficult to make it look smooth so eit...

her manual mode or fear out how to use exposure lock on your camera manual focus would be most ideal because if there's a tree close to you in one shot and it happens to be centered when you capture that section it's going to focus on the tree and then you go to the next one and there's a mountain far away and that's the only thing it's going to focus on the mountain you're gonna have varying focus throughout your shots so focused once and then just click your lens over to manual focus where you're going across your pan around then finally if you're a tripod you want a level two parts of your tripod whatever part is going to rotate when you do your panorama usually it's right below your ball head that's on there there's a little lever you loosened so you can rotate around that needs to be level if it's not level then as you go across your scene you're going to going downhill we're uphill issue go across and then the final thing is the top of your camera you should have level so if you don't have an elektronik level in your camera my five mark three had elektronik one in just turned on you get the info button couple times until you see the electron level if you don't have that you slide a little bubble level into the hot shoe your camera you combined from being h and other camera stores level that horizontally because otherwise you're going to take all these crooked pictures and you know just have a bunch of crooked ones so when you stitch them together they'd be a lot of cropping involved get it to be a rectangle so the wherever you're tripod rotates around to do your panorama that needs to be level you see there's a little bitty bubble level there you can adjust your tripod legs to get level at the top of your camera then when you called cross you'll get a nice smooth panorama you're not going to end up slowly going down and she could cross or anything like that you know what your thing is take off your circular all right take off your polarizing if you have if you have a polarizing filter polarizing filter will darken blue skies and it will do it mohr when you're pointed ninety degrees from where the sun is and it'll do it less as you get away from that so that if you have a polarizer on your camera lens you're going to get very uneven sky when you do a panorama thanks for that um so those with shooting tips now let's ditch a panorama so here is a panorama of a waterfall that I shot in uh either oregon and washington so there's my just three shots I'm going to select those three shots click on the first hole downshift and get the last and in fact before I do that I'm going to talk about pre adjustment and so let's just work with more than three images I have another siri's down here I click on this one because this one's many more pictures it's more dramatic to see it s so anyway select all your image is go to the file menu choose opening camera so you're going to see all your images of thumb now so here then scroll through your images and look for the most important or the most challenging part of the panorama toe optimize I'm going to click here before you make any changes to the sliders are on the right we need to make sure any changes we make are consistent across all of them so they still match and brightness and color so in the upper left clip the select all button now before I continue let me show you what this image looked like before I optimized it because this isn't the original I'll go to the upper right and choose camera defaults that was kind of the somme ways these are the grand tetons if I remember correctly I'll choose undo because I've messed with this a little bit last night so before after but what I want to make sure is that I hit the select all button before I ended up adjusting the picture now what I actually did this last night I didn't have all the images selected if I go back to bridge it'll let me move this out of the way on if you can tell or not but the's end shots like this one here you see the sky is brighter than this one we're actually this one and the same thing is true on the opposite end of the panorama that's outside of your view and enbridge there so let me show you what you can do if you forget to hit the select all button you spend all your time optimizing and you realize oh man it only affected one image so here's how we get it on the rest of the images because right now if you look at the top two of them see how bright the sky is compared everything below it I didn't have a mall selected so here's how you do it you have the image that's already optimized visible on the screen here so that you cooked on it that's the one that's highlighted then hit the select all button so you have them all in finally hit synchronized synchronized just means copy from the picture we're looking at and apply it to the rest of them that are selected so I hit synchronized and it'll ask me which settings because sometimes you don't want to do things like apply cropping the same toe all your pictures that kind of stuff but for a panorama all that's fine click okay and then it is going to copy all those settings and apply it to everything that selected so usually I make sure my white balance has been adjusted because your camera's on auto white balance as you go across the scene if the sun's in one spot it might be warmer than where it's not in a very so I at least adjust my white balance but otherwise I optimized my picture and you can see none of my sliders they're zero I've changed this thing quite a bit there's not a single slider that's the default settings click done then to stitch your panorama now going to switch to that other set because I don't want to stitch that many pictures and have you wait for a progress bar so now I'll come up to our our waterfall I go to the tools menu choose photo shop and I choose photo merge I wish they would name it photo merge why isn't it called stitch panorama and in light room you go to the photo menu choose edit in and I think there's a menu choice that's got a better name like stitch into panorama or something like that but extension to the exact same part of photo shop is this will in here it gives you a list of your exposures and on the left you can choose how photo shop is able to distort those images in order to get them to match up I usually start off with otto but it doesn't always give you an end was good looking and result let's see what we get here I'm just using default settings on everything and from what I remember on this particular image and think it'll screw up but the majority of the time otto does fine I mean I would say on seventy five percent of the images no it's doing just takes well yeah so the auto isn't always best and what happens is they're different ways that photo shop could distort things one of those ways is it could just be able to grab the four corners of the image and reposition them and I can tell that's what it did here because I see these straight lines on the edges and I just don't think that's ideal necessarily although I could crop it and if what was in the rectangular area was fine it might do fine but what I'm going to do is after I've tried auto if I don't like the look of the end result I'm just going to try it again so let's try it again and I'll just force it into one of the other settings go back to bridge tools photo shop foot emerge in this time I can tell it used this setting because I saw the shape of the images and they had very distinct straight lines or angled lines on their edges right it did not have curves on the edge is I'm going to force it to use the kind where it bends the photo instead of just moving the corners then I'll click okay and let's see if it's any better but like I said at least seventy five percent of the time in the eighty percent the auto setting does fine and all it's doing is automatically choosing one of those choices but in this particular case I think it's going to be better with something else this waterfalls kind of lyrics has got a kink in it changes uh you see it changes little direction there when it hits a ledge and I'm sure my wife karen remembers the name of this waterfall and she's probably texting me at the moment but my phones in airplane mode so I can't see it karen you'll have to get in the forums or something all right now in this particular case it left one piece down here because it felt I didn't need it or couldn't line it up and I had enough overlap in these images where it looks like it was able to piece them together but this is my end result the main thing have to do afterwards is to crop it uh if if I felt it needed that other piece I'd have to choose another one of those modes and try again now let's see if I can get it to mess up enough where we need some additional fix here is a panorama that if I stitch it together the end result looks like this now the reason I didn't stitch that I just don't want you to wait for a progress garden bar to finish but if I use the auto setting this is the end result in notice that it has worms the little bitty weird looking transitions well just like when we did the focus bracketing or focus stacking it's the same issue if I zoom up to hundred percent view that's not truly there or if I flattened my image it won't truly be there in this case I'm going to go to the layer menu and choose merge visible to just combine them together so you can see it's not not in there in the end result now with this image when I'm done the main thing I need to do is crop the image so grab the crop tool and I'll pull in these edges to try to get this to be a full rectangle instead of an odd shape but when I do that look at how close my cropping ends up coming in on the top of the photo I think that's unacceptable and in fact I might still have a little corner of nothing mess in the upper left so I think I actually need to bring this down to about there and that's a little close to the top in that so sometimes I need to take another step after stitching her panorama to allow me to crop it properly first thing is what I'm shooting the panorama at a little padding meaning zoom out a little bit so that if you run into a situation like this one you don't have critical cropping and camera you got a little bit of extra space so when you crop you can end up with a nice rectangle but if you didn't think about it which I didn't think of here here's how I can fix it I'm going to do a special technique photo shop is going to magically fill in the empty areas with new information based on what's currently in the photo and here is the technique I go to my layers panel first off I need to have merged the individual layers together when you first or done stitching a panorama but she was undo here you will have individual layers you need to go to the layer menu and choose merge visible when you do that those layers will we combine into one so that's the first thing you needed to do second thing is I'm going to move my mouth onto the little thumbnail image for the layer in my layers pal I'm gonna hold on our special key and my keyboard it happens to be on a mac the command key on windows it's control when I do that watch what happens to my mouse usually looks like a hand but the moment I hold on the command key to see a little selection icon appear on top of it that means that when I command click control clicking and windows on this little thumb now it's going to produce a selection so now if you look at my picture it's just selected everything that's in this layer they'd simply ignored the empty areas and say's it just selected everything it's not empty now I don't actually want to work on this area I want to work on the opposite of it and there's a way I could get the opposite of this but before I do sometimes the edge of my selection fades out by one or two pixels it's got a soft edge and I need to make sure that I compensate for that so the first thing I'm going to do after getting the selection was I'll choose select modify contract this means make my selection smaller by the amount I type in one or two works fine so right now we have a selection if I looked at its edge and I choose undo before it was right on the edge after it's in just the teeniest bit because I need to have my selection kind of overlapped the image and so choosing contract bringing it in by one or two pixels just makes it so the selection's not right on the edge it's overlapping now I actually want to get the area that's empty selected so all I need to do is go to the select menu where I find a choice called inverse inverse means giving the opposite so when I choose inverse instead of having the area where the picture is selected I got everything else and my selection overlaps it goes into the picture itself one or two pixels now we're all set now all I need to do is go to the edit menu choose fill in use default settings the now just in case you used phil before days ago is goingto have whatever settings you used last the main thing is I have this set to content aware which is the default and down here said to normal in a hundred and make sure that check boxes not turned on because preserve transparency would mean don't change the empty parts and it wouldn't be able to fill it in now it is looking at what's existing in the image and saying what would naturally fill this area what would look natural based on the rest of the picture and most of time it does a pretty good job but I have to be critical of it afterwards and if there's any area where it messed up just select that little area were messed up and do it again I'll hide the edges and I'll choose undo so you could see before and after you haven't filled that ends pretty impressive it works usually pretty amazingly on skies skies are pretty simple not hard to figure out is where you have fine detail that it can easily mess up so inspect your image look for repeats of textures and shapes but it's pretty darn good in here pretty darn good coming down here yeah I'm not sure if I like that part right there thing just looks like there's a little chunk that might not belong if that's the case grab a selection tool select just the area where it looks messed up and then do the phil part again it will re calculate that part was something different and but go across and be critical of what's there right there that's a place that looks out of focus it doesn't look natural also right there that looks better anyway be critical of it go through here sometimes we actually have to do some manual re touching because you try it two or three times and it still messes up and if that's the case like right here on if you can see this is a kind of dark but this little edge I can see it again right there I think that's the same edge they just copied it so phil comes unaware and see it grabbed the same spot again if you guys could see that or not so I might have to manually retouch that area with a different tool but otherwise using content where phil is pretty amazing as far as being would do that now I could crop that in the shower I'd like questions comments anything it's okay if the answer's no you know shauna I don't know if this is completely on topic but shauna bradley wanted to know what's the difference between merge visible and flatten image we'll talk about that tomorrow only talk about layers great but in general flatten image would fill the empty parts with white whereas merge visible would leave the empty parts empty flattened means no empty parts perfect all right all right let's see what else can we do let's do a quick time lapse time lassus something pretty common these days if you haven't have a nikon camera I know that most of them have a timer built in where if you searched the menu system or if you google little google the word interval ometer interval ometer and then the model of your camera and if you have a nikon its built in where you can tell it to take a picture every three seconds and take this number of pictures and then you could just hit start and leave your camera sitting there in a lot of magically take a picture every three seconds or a picture every three minutes or whatever you wanted teo on a canon camera most of time they don't put that feature in instead they want you to buy a stupid remote that's expensive that you plug in and then on the little remote which has the most stupid interface that you can imagine we have to deal with like three buttons to do something that should be in text you can tell it how often it should take a picture you can also get some new products I can't think of their names though where you can use your iphone and plug it in your camera and therefore you have a better interface but in general it's known as an interval ometer that is a timer that tells your picture your camera to take a picture every so many seconds or minutes now let's say you've done that and then you would like to turn something into a time lapse well there's a bunch of different techniques we could use for that and so let's take a look at at least one here is a series of images my wife karen took when we were at the albuquerque balloon fiesta so she set up a camera on a tripod she's got a nikon that's why she took it so she said it to take a picture I don't remember how often but she captured this stuff the balloon's going by and what was wild and you know look at how far away the balloons are and then eventually watch what happens I'm just using the right arrow kia my keyboard to cycle through these and you see there really far away and then suddenly and it gets closer to us and then I think it goes down so that was kind of cool that we got one there there's a freeway right next to us in the bottom edge of the frame so you might see a car go by every once in a while so anyway she took the sequences of images and one thing it's kind of cool is remember yesterday we talked about stacks in bridge how you could grab a couple images you could type command g or go up to the stacks menu and say group into a stack and it would stack multiple images on top of each other and just put a number up there if I clicked on the number it would expand him show them all click on the number again it would collapse it well if you put something into a stack it's kind of weird but when you make this little bigger with a stack it actually puts a little play button in a progress bar and if you grab that little doo dad you can pull on it and kind of preview your time lapse even though there's no time lapse in there there's hundreds of files in there it's not one file that's a movie five but you could kind of preview what it might look like so here's another one that I shot when all I did was I using I was using my finger to press the shutter was on a tripod and everyone whenever something interesting happened I took another shot I could take that and group is a stack don't go up there and find it and then let's see what that one would do but it's kind of fun that they put that little feature in but then how can we end up turning one of these into an actual time lapse here we got another one of your group that into a stack okay you don't have to group mindo stack it's just a nice way to organize things to make it convenient well what I need to do is first off I need to optimize these images I would usually just um in camera raw just like it'd a panorama brightened up bad saturation whatever I'm not going to do that step the second thing I'm going to do is I need to get them is either a j peg file or a tiff so in order to do that I'll select all the images I'll choose tools photoshopped image processor and in the image processor I can type in the size that I want I'm gonna do this for hd video nineteen twenty by ten eighty is like a hd video screen I'm going to set the quality is high as it goes I think twelve this size is it goes and I'm just going to say save this onto my desktop and when I hit run it's going to open every single one of those images scale it down and save it as a j peg every single one now let me see if I have a folder with that's already been done because that might take a while I'll look at this timelapse j pegs let's see if we go over and cancel that if you ever want to try to cancel something try either the escape key or command period and oh I couldn't do it because I did command period or escape enough times where it said oh he's trying to cancel okay so I'm going to use this siri's of images where that process has already been done I think this first image actually might not be part of the time lapse if I see it looks radically different compared to slightly different so I might delete that first one the next thing I need to do after I get these all scaled down and save this j pegs are tiffs is I need the naming of these to be sequential there can't be a gap if I deleted this one because the bird flew by or something happened you know somebody stood up in front of the camera lens you like that and I delete that frame then it's goingto cause some issues so I'm going to select all go to the tools menu and choose battery name in a battery name I could just give it a go get rid of this thing taxed I'll call this and I'm going to come down here and say give me a sequence number that is four digits x I don't know how many frames I have and I hit rename just to make sure they're all sequential that there's nothing that has a gap in the numbering system of those pictures okay finally I'm going to go to fetter shop and I'm gonna go over here and choose new are not new open sorry gonna choose open and I'm going to go find that folder take me a moment find it here because I buried it perhaps time lapse j pegs okay I think I found the folder in select the very first file at the bottom there's a check box called image sequence if you turn it on what is going to do is use the file you have selected as the very first frame and then it's gonna grab all the others they're in that folder and when I click okay I just need to tell it how many frames per second how quickly should it present those images and I'll come in here and say maybe fifteen frames per second you click okay and I haven't time lapse what did I do I just chose open I gave it the first image and turned on one check box that check box was called image sequence if I go up here to the window menu and choose timeline that's what gives you the video features I could hit the play button you see our timeline now I had to choose the frame rate and I had to just pick number off the top of my head maybe I want these to go by faster how do I do it well if you look at your timeline you're gonna have a little bar here the lips didn't mean to click whatever I clicked and on the right side of the bars a little arrow click there and you can change the speed so if you need it to be two hundred percent fast you know that kind of thing then just hit play again and now it should play my faster finally if you want to save the file choose file export rendered video and it will present you with a bunch of settings related to video compression and you could save that out so that's a general technique for putting together a time lapse it's pretty simple in that you mainly need to scale them down get emma's j pegs are tiffs make sure the naming is sequential and then open feed it first image turn on image sequence all right so video is a pretty brand new feature therein photoshopped correct man actually that thing with the image sequence has been in there for a while uh the thing that's new is they introduced a video timeline instead of ah frame animation but you've been able to do that for quite some time see that's why we love having you here class is showing us things that have been buried deep in for things to change the speed afterwards is somewhat new but I don't know that it's brand brandon yeah cool awesome