Lessons

Lesson Info

Optimizing Panoramas in Photoshop

all right so let's talk more about finishing our images often photo shop we still have one thing I want to mention when it comes to just specialize techniques but then after that we're just going to look at images in general and say how can we bring him into photo shop and make them look a lot better so one of the last two issues we need to deal with his panoramas because we talked about shooting and panorama I mentioned what I do with my gear the way I think about my camera settings but I don't believe I've shown you really how I stitch it and more importantly what I do after I stitch it if there's anything necessary so first I'm going to select these images just click on the first one hold shift and click on the last one these happen to be j peg images if you ever see me work on a j peg file all that means is I most likely scaled down the picture to make it smaller so you don't have to watch progress bar something usually all of the files I work on a raw files and but a lot of people...

will notice that and and comment so anyway I'm going to choose tools photo shop and there's a choice called photo merge you'll find a similar choice in adobe light room if you happen to prefer to use that you get select the images go to the photo menu there will be a choice called edit in and I think instead of being called photo merge it'll say something like merge into panorama or something a little more useful but it'll send you to the same place in photo shop you get this dialog box in all this this is a list of the files that you uh have chosen and then on the left side or different choices for how photoshopped could stitch those together I'm going to just start off with the choice called otto and if I happen to not like the end result I could send it back through this again enforce it into limiting the type of distortion it could use to try to line the images up but in general I'm not going to touch anything in here I'm just going to click okay and now if you watch my layers panel you see photoshopped stacking those images one on top of the other the next thing it does is it's aligning them and the final thing it does is it tries to match the brightness in order to successfully do that we really need to make sure our exposure was locked in so it was consistent across that whole image and that our focus point was the same across all of them otherwise you might get one shot that's got one of the trees in the background and focus in a line out of focus so here's what we'll get if you look in the layers panel it delivers you individual layers one for each of the images and each one has a mask attached to it I find that it's rare that changing these mass is really going to help me so what I'm going to do is simply combine those layers together by going to the layer menu and there's a choice called merge visible now a lot of people want to know what the heck is the difference between merge layers merge visible and flatten image will merge layers just so you know is talking about on ly the layers you have selected so if he only had two layers selected or three layers he could do that merge visible means merged together all the layers that have the eyeballs turned on but none of them that have the eyeballs turned off in flatten image means the equipment to merge visible and then throw away any layers that have the eyeballs turned off in addition to that fill any areas that are empty that looked like a checkerboard phylum usually with white and I don't want those areas to be full of white so I'm not going to choose flattened image I'm choosing merge visible instead so if you watch my layers panel you'll see those layers I'll get combined in one and the next thing you do after stitching a panorama is we need to crop it so I go to the crop tool and with this particular image well the last time I used the crops will had some numbers typed in appear so it's remembering those s o it's limiting me I'm going to hit clear there pull this out but with this particular image it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing to crop in on the picture but sometimes if you ended up framing up your panorama with critical framing at the time you shot it then bringing in the edge here to get rid of those transparent areas at the bottom and doing the same thing at the top might end up making this get too tight at the top and bottom if you did critical framing in camera and that's why I said what I'm in the field that I usually add a little bit of padding I zoom out the little lisbet when I'm shooting a panorama so that if it comes in and it's not a perfect rectangle I have space for cropping where it's not going to cut things off here I still have some in the upper right that looks like a checker boards have to pull it in further so I can crop but what if I had done visual cropping in camera where I got critically close on the edges and it just wouldn't feel right to throw away any of that information I'll choose undo and let's see what I could do is an alternative if I wouldn't be willing to throw away that information I just cropped out then here's a special technique that I can use for filling the areas that are currently look empty the areas that appears a checkerboard what I would do is go over to my layers panel and in my layers panel I've moved my mouse onto the little thumbnail image for that layer and I'd hold down the command chiana macintosh that's the control key and windows I'm holding that key down right now when you hold it down the normal cursor you get usually looks like a hand the moment you hold on the command key it looks like there's a little selection icon on top of it and if I command click on this icon I'm going to get a selection when I command click on that little thumb now it ends up selecting everything that's in that particular layer and it does not select the part that's empty now what I really need is the opposite of this I actually need the parts that are empty because that's the part of the image that I want to work with but I need my selection to extend about one pixel or maybe two into the middle of this picture so before I end up changing the area that selected I'll go to the select menu there's a choice called modify and I'm going to choose contract contract means keep my selection the same shape but make it smaller so when I choose contract I'm gonna type in one one or two either one will work and now I want to get the opposite area selected so instead of having the photo selected I want everything surrounding it go to the select menu choose modify again actually not modify up near the top go to the select me and she's in verse but she's in versatile give me the opposite it's hard to tell that it did anything but it has now selected the areas that are empty if you look out here you can see the selection edges on the outside edge of the picture it extends down here and here and if you look really close do you see that it actually overlaps it goes one or two pixels into the picture itself that's what I need all I needed to do is to find which area needs to be filled in which area do I need photo shop to deal with and I need this to come into the picture just the tiniest bit now here's how you can get photoshopped to fill that area in go to the edit menu and choose phil when this comes up the default setting is usually in here called content aware but I've used this particular dialog box last night uh and and so it's not at the default at the moment but had I not touched anything and had a default install that would have been the default setting that's what I need to use and I'm simply going to click okay now content aware what it does is it looks at the content of the rest of the picture and it tries to figure out what it think would naturally fit into this area if this area was not empty so when I click okay it's going to attempt to fill those empty areas with something that things would belong there and so I'm going to hide the edges of the selection I could do that by typing command age and let's look at the end resolved look I'm just going to do it on and off so I could see before and after and in many places it's not bad on the right side of the photograph I don't think that's all that bad coming down here you notice here we had yellowish stuff it extended that yellowish stuff down to the edge in it knew to transition into this more gray kind of area there are some areas that are less than ideal on the far left of the photograph what it ended up being put over here looks a little bit soft possibly a little blurry and it suddenly got a little softer up here where it hit the top of that tree but what you can do if he wants who is grab the lasso tool in just circle any area where you think it wasn't quite ideal and go to the edit menu and just try to second time but instead of refilling the entire area here we're only going to refill that one little choice and you can come up there as many times as you want and uh try it so ed it phil content aware and just click okay each time it would fill it with something different in this time I don't think what's there is is bad it doesn't look quite as blurry that kind of thing so any area you don't like just grab your lasso tool it's like do a second chance see that's looking different so once you've done that enough times to fill in different areas that might look a little bit on the odd side you might be able to get an acceptable image where you don't have to crop it as much just so you know there is a keyboard shortcut for getting into that dialogue box and what I use is shift delete hold down the shift key which I have held down right now and just hit delete that I think that would be the backspace key and windows because the doleac in backspace any car equivalents and so therefore I could do it very quickly to various areas then I can crop still if I want to for composition but at least I'm not limited to having to crop uh due to the stitching of that panorama after this it's all about just optimizing the image is there any area within the file you think needs to be a bit brighter in the area and he's darker more contrast less contrast color issues all that kind of stuff and that's what I'm going to start playing with in general before we do that are there any questions about this particular technique or panoramas got one from mom yeah yeah before you did teo emergent a pan oh would you you opened it in in bridge would you select them and do the same types of things you did for the hdr which would be you know look for chromatic aberrations and lens correction and yeah in general I would have I would have optimized the image in general s o that I would open all these images and camera I would hit the select all buttons so it affected all the images equally and I would move any and every slider that I could to make this image look as good as I could before I stitch it because then we're limited in the tools that we can use afterwards and so it's it's best to get much out of that image and kameron before you stitch it