Lessons

Lesson Info

Editing: Image Stitching

(wind howling) Looking back on a wild day with our team out in the mountains. One thing that just really hit home is how amazing it is to see a landscape that I'm so familiar with. Like, I think I've been up on that mountain peak probably over 50 times and seeing it in the winter is always special because you just have to really send it to make it out there. It's something that, you know, has taken me a few years to be able to do myself and to do it safely. And by having connections, by having friends that are local to the area that have grown up there, they've really taught me a lot about just respecting the area, respecting the conditions, and being able to go out there and capture images like this. It's just really special. So I've been able to create an image of my friend, Siggy, standing up on the mountain peak and, obviously, it's quite sketchy. So he was roped in and he kept saying, "Is it okay that we have the ropes in the shot?" Of course, I think it's great to have the rope...

s. You know, the thing that I wanna get across is that we must show respect to the rules and to not give the wrong impression to the viewer. We don't want to influence them to do something that's wrong. So by having the ropes in, we can show, okay, you really have to be safe out there. And you know, there is high consequences. So by roping yourself up, having the knowhow and the knowledge, we can do something that's a little bit crazy and we can do it really safe. If we look at the edit, we have made this image, as I was explaining in the field, by creating a huge stitch using my 135 millimeter lens. Now, that's taken some serious computing to do. And the final result is 294 megapixels, which is just really wild to think about. And I can show you on the screen here the actual images that went into creating the final shot. So we have a sequence of something like 30 images. I'm just gonna scan through them now and you can kind of get an idea. We've gone up and down and across and kind of just thought about every image overlapping. Luckily, Siggy stood quite still during that period. And I can quickly show you how I went to stitch them together. So I made the selection of the raws. I've put them in a smart collection or into a collection where they're easily accessible. Selecting them all, going to Photo and Photomerge Panorama. Now this is going to take a long time to create that and then, in turn, to stitch those together. So can leave that for you guys to try out yourselves at home. You do have the three options and for being really tied in with the 135, I use the spherical option to set the, kind of, distortion, boundaries and everything like that. But just cycle through them all and see which one looks most visually correct for the given scene. But for now, we're going to check out the final stitched image in its raw form. Hit D as always, going into our Develop module. And the first thing I wanna do before I consider anything else is set the crop and we have plenty of resolutions, so it doesn't matter if we punch in quite a lot on this. I'm going to edit for the vertical format, but having all of this data means we can edit a landscape crop, we can edit portrait crop. We can really do anything we want. We just have so many options with this. I'm not too happy having the sky cut off where it is or the top of the frame. So I'm actually going to take off the constrain to image function there and go above the boundary and see if I can't add some frame in Photoshop. It will be really challenging, but we'll see what we can do. I can only try. So I'm finding a point where I get this nice even top and, at least then, there's no additional textures that are gonna get in the way when I try and do this Content-Aware Fill. So something like that, I think I'm gonna have to rotate a little to get it looking straight. I was probably not thinking so much about keeping the horizon level straight when I was doing the stitch. So that's quite difficult to think about all those things at once. I'm just checking that he's lined up in the middle or at least the rocks' bio is lined up in the middle. Maybe that means that Siggy is pushed a little to the right but you have to consider the overall visual weight and the balance of the central item in the photo. And it's not just the person but actually the whole rocks' bio. Visual weight is something that is kind of confusing to hear. But, basically, it's just thinking of the image. If it's too heavy on one side, it might tip over. So I'm trying to create some kind of consistency in the framing and the light to give it, kind of, balance. So it's not gonna fall either way, just is what it is. It's nice and clean. So I think we're good here. A little more rotation and we're gonna go into Photoshop. One last thing before I go into Photoshop is I want to do everything to this image, while it's in raw, that requires color manipulation. So that includes setting the white balance and the exposure 'cause they both change the color. I don't wanna blow it out but I want to just get this looking natural in appearance before I move it into the TIF format because then it's really hard to change after that. So something like this, it's gonna be quite easy to work with, I think. We can do all the contrast stuff later because it's not gonna change the actual color very much from here. I think we're getting already quite close. So I'm gonna go ahead and commit to the Command + E and that's gonna boost this guy into Photoshop. Because it's such a big file, it's gonna take a lot of time, just like the stitch. So I think I'm just gonna go and make myself a coffee and we've already covered the Patch tool. That is literally all that I'm gonna need to fill in those blanks on the edges. And we'll meet here with the click of a finger and everything will be good and ready to edit. So here we go. You ready? (fingers snap) And we're here. So we now have a fresh canvas ready to edit. The colors are set, we're in TIF format now, and we're going to begin to sculpt the light and create some kind of dimension to this shot. Just building on what we already have present in the frame. I think what we can do is try to fade out the background a little bit. So I'm gonna open a graduated filter and just attempt to kind of dehaze over the top of the frame. It's looking nice. It's not causing too much of a negative impact 'cause sometimes it just looks really horrible using this Dehaze tool. Just gonna darken a little bit. And likewise, just going to actually use the small color addition. It's almost like a split tone. We're adding a color overlay on this area. I'm just going to use a similar blue to what's around it and it's going to make it seem more natural. Almost like there really was fog on that part of the image. I also couldn't get it exactly perfect in Photoshop. I still have a couple of parts that are clearly cloned that they're evident in two parts of the image. So I'm just going to use the Clone Stamp in Lightroom to just run over those areas and try and just get them to be neutral white. I think that's the safest bet here. It's going to just overlay that and wear off. Close and zoom out. Things are looking good. I see one dot up there that's repeated. So I'm just gonna click on that and that's gonna go away and now we're looking pretty good. We're getting close now. So, a little bit of exposure, a little bit further balancing those blues because they're looking a little bit intrusive. I think they're taking away from the overall vibe of the image. So just bringing them... Everything is working at its hardest with this iMac to keep up with this photo. If anyone knows how to downscale a raw image, please send me an email. Okay, going to now work for the contrast and just bring in a little bit of the tone curve. This one's more of a generic tone curve, actually, because we have, like, a full range of exposures, of course, mostly in the white areas, but, overall, this kind of almost points exactly on the three lines as normal. It's looking quite contrasty though. We're gonna see what happens if I bring some shadows up and then going back up here 'cause I feel like this is now too bright in the top. We're starting to really hone in on Siggy there on the rock, but it is quite saturated. So by moving into the HSL module, we can just refine the colors a little bit. I wanna bring a little bit more green in as I always do. I'm a bit addicted to that and desaturate them a little bit in the blues. I like that we have some color in the rock. Like, there's even some moss visible in the center. It just gives it some, kind of, realistic edge to show that, no, this is not just crazy edited. Like, it literally was this wide out landscape with this tiny bit of life left on the landscape on the rocks. And, of course, Siggy on top. Next up, I'm just going to try and desaturate the entire image. And I'm gonna paint in a little bit of darkness over Siggy just to bring back a bit of contrast in some of the brighter areas, like his hand and his face. Of course, like, we are working with such a high res file. So these small details, if you were to print it big, they're all important. So you should, if that's your intention, at least, to print big, just go in and have a look at the finer details to just make sure that the colors are balanced correctly and everything is on track. It's quite a simple edit. There's not a whole lot to be done. Having a little bit of trouble dealing with the sky. I think it's a brightness issue from the Dehaze and maybe also needs a couple of radio filters where the Dehaze meets the normal, kind of, valley floor. So I'm just gonna add a little bit of brightness there too. I think in selected areas like here, I see a little bit of darkness. I think it's perfect for... Something that's cool, you know, this one, as well as looking at a drone image, you know, straight down with the snow, they're great fillers and they still have, like, a strong story to them but they're just calm and neutral and they're great to use especially for social media as, you know, placeholders for times when you have these really intense images, they maybe look crazy next to each other. If you slot this in the middle, you can kind of break it up a little bit. Just going to now work on the foreground and just wanna bring a little bit of darkness. See if there's any kind of contrast or darker shadows that we can kind of highlight to make it not just seem like one huge white patch. I think we've got that. I'm just gonna bring the overall exposure down. It's quite a simple edit on this one, actually. I like the colors that are already evident in the shot. Just refining a little bit. I'm gonna add my split tone to the white, just to give a neutral value to the whole bright area of the shot. Balancing it, see, now it's almost too green, so I'm just countering my own movements sometimes, but I feel like they're all necessary steps in order to get to this, kind of, really even outcome. Noticing on this side, a slight inconsistency. It's looking a little bit more green than the other side, I would say. Even maybe a little too bright. Just playing with some really fine adjustments there too. All right, getting somewhere. Gonna have a quick look at the sharpening on this one too. Punch in. We have unbelievable detail. Takes a little while to load, but when I scroll around this and I just look at the rocks, you know, it's remarkable and it's something like a large format would create and you've done it just by stitching a few shots, waiting it out for a long time sometimes, but it can be worth it in the end. I'm pretty happy with that level of detail. I'm going to mute the whites in this one. So in some areas I've got, you know, inconsistency in brightness. So by muting them, I can kind of create this gray effect across the frame. And it might look just more cohesive, basically. This area in the top's looking a little blue. So I'm just gonna apply one little white balance filter. And across these images, a lot of the same principles going into them. And it's basically just honing in on your overall visual style and highlighting specific things, specific color schemes, specific ways of framing, specific ways of applying filters to create, kind of, leading lines. They all are important and, at least, I don't wanna overlook them. So I'm just repeating, kind of, things over and over again. And that's how I kind of have developed this style. And now I'm just gonna before and after. I'm pretty happy. We've got... A little bit more brightness could be necessary. I'm reading, again, those values under the histogram. And I'm seeing now 95.2. So I just knock that little bit and I'm gonna get myself very similar to some of my other edits and she's gonna look quite consistent. All right. I think we've achieved something that I'm really happy with and a very unique moment looking down over this really interesting spire. Very lucky to have conditions that allow us to be up there and very lucky to be with trained mountaineers that are able to send it up, set up a rope system, be safe up there. Using that telephoto lens to punch in and create a stitch has allowed us to create unbelievable resolution and something that is quite unique from, you know, these wider shots that you would most likely see in this location. So where it's all about creating these unique perspectives. And I think coming home with a bunch of variety and allowing yourself to have those options, you know, the wide, the tight, they're very useful for situations like this where you just wanna do something a little bit different.