Back in June I shot a vertical panorama of Bassett's Cove (Portreath, Cornwall). The edit was a little tricky and so I've decided to make a post on how I completed the final picture.
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First off, you must make sure that when you are shooting a panorama, you use manual exposure settings and in the first stages of editing (which I will cover soon), the edit on each picture in the same. If you don't follow these 'rules', it can be very hard, if not impossible to stitch the final image together.
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First Edit of Raw Files
When creating a panorama you are going to be working with quite a lot of files and so, you will want to stay organised. I personally use Photoshop and Camera RAW for post processing, and to stay organised I give each photograph a star rating. I was working with two sets of images and so I gave one set (seen below) as 5-star, these were the sky exposures. I then also gave the other set of images a 3-star rating, these were the foreground exposures.
First off, you must make sure that when you are shooting a panorama, you use manual exposure settings and in the first stages of editing (which I will cover soon), the edit on each picture in the same. If you don't follow these 'rules', it can be very hard, if not impossible to stitch the final image together.
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First Edit of Raw Files
When creating a panorama you are going to be working with quite a lot of files and so, you will want to stay organised. I personally use Photoshop and Camera RAW for post processing, and to stay organised I give each photograph a star rating. I was working with two sets of images and so I gave one set (seen below) as 5-star, these were the sky exposures. I then also gave the other set of images a 3-star rating, these were the foreground exposures.
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After organising, you will be starting the primary edit. I tend to edit the sky images first, I have taken a screenshot of the settings which I have used for this particular shoot. You can by all means use this as a basis, but make the different sliders work for your own images. In case you don't know what they do, I will go through them and explain why they are at those amounts.
To start, you want to just pick one image from the panorama, this means you should find one image that covers most of the aspects of your final shot. As you can see from the screenshot above-left, the image I chose to edit first included the sky (clouds and sun) and the foreground).
You may notice that I have circled one of the tabs, this is 'lens correction' and is vital to any image. It will remove chromatic aberration, lens distortion (important with landscapes and wide-angle shots) and vignetting.
- The temperature for this image is set to 'cloudy' because, although technically the true white balance of the scene would be somewhere between that and 'daylight', I wanted to accentuate the sunset colours by warming the image.
- Exposure is purely a choice of yours and how bright you want your image to be, at this stage in the edit, I use the exposure slider to balance out the histogram and make sure I have detail over the whole dynamic range which I can then exploit in a later edit of the full panorama.
- To directly affect one part of the histogram (i.e. dark and light parts of the image) use the highlights and shadows sliders. Usually in a landscape shoot, the sky will be brighter than the foreground and you may not have the right filter to even out the exposure, this is when the highlight slider is useful. In this shot I have it at -100 to make the area of the sun smaller. It is hard to explain, but if you try this out with your own images will you know what I mean. I have set the shadows to +100, simply to make the blending later easier, this will again become apparent later.
- Next is the whites and blacks sliders, I don't like to play with contrast sliders until right at the end of my edit, but I will use these two sliders to get the best 'looking' histogram before proceeding to the next stage. Sliding the whites up will stretch the right side of the histogram toward the right edge and you want to stop just before the histogram touches the side, and vice-versa for the blacks. This basically means that your whites are white and your blacks are black, which is an important part of the edit if you have played with the highlights and shadow sliders (which will flatten your image).
To start, you want to just pick one image from the panorama, this means you should find one image that covers most of the aspects of your final shot. As you can see from the screenshot above-left, the image I chose to edit first included the sky (clouds and sun) and the foreground).
You may notice that I have circled one of the tabs, this is 'lens correction' and is vital to any image. It will remove chromatic aberration, lens distortion (important with landscapes and wide-angle shots) and vignetting.
- The temperature for this image is set to 'cloudy' because, although technically the true white balance of the scene would be somewhere between that and 'daylight', I wanted to accentuate the sunset colours by warming the image.
- Exposure is purely a choice of yours and how bright you want your image to be, at this stage in the edit, I use the exposure slider to balance out the histogram and make sure I have detail over the whole dynamic range which I can then exploit in a later edit of the full panorama.
- To directly affect one part of the histogram (i.e. dark and light parts of the image) use the highlights and shadows sliders. Usually in a landscape shoot, the sky will be brighter than the foreground and you may not have the right filter to even out the exposure, this is when the highlight slider is useful. In this shot I have it at -100 to make the area of the sun smaller. It is hard to explain, but if you try this out with your own images will you know what I mean. I have set the shadows to +100, simply to make the blending later easier, this will again become apparent later.
- Next is the whites and blacks sliders, I don't like to play with contrast sliders until right at the end of my edit, but I will use these two sliders to get the best 'looking' histogram before proceeding to the next stage. Sliding the whites up will stretch the right side of the histogram toward the right edge and you want to stop just before the histogram touches the side, and vice-versa for the blacks. This basically means that your whites are white and your blacks are black, which is an important part of the edit if you have played with the highlights and shadow sliders (which will flatten your image).
After you have played with these edits and have the image looking how you would like, you need to sync the other image in the panorama to the exact same edit. To do this, you need to hold CTRL and select the other images that you have marked as the same star rating (this is why you rated them earlier). Then click the 'synchronize' button (circled in the image to the left).
Now you want to apply the same techniques to the second set of images. After this is complete you will have a set of images exposed and edited for the sky and another set of images exposed and edited for the foreground.
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Stitching
Now it is time to stitch, and I although there are a few different ways to get to the final point this is a breakdown of how I do it.
Open the first set of images (sky or foreground) and go to File >> Automate >> Photomerge
Now you want to apply the same techniques to the second set of images. After this is complete you will have a set of images exposed and edited for the sky and another set of images exposed and edited for the foreground.
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Stitching
Now it is time to stitch, and I although there are a few different ways to get to the final point this is a breakdown of how I do it.
Open the first set of images (sky or foreground) and go to File >> Automate >> Photomerge
Click the 'Add Open Files' button. The settings that you can see in the following screenshot, is how yours should be set up. The vignetting and distortion control have already been done in Camera RAW, inside the lens correction tab. Then click okay and wait for a couple of minutes for the stitch.
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It is likely that after you complete the stitching, your image will be quite distorted, here is an example of how the foreground stitch actually came out:
For the sake of keeping this blog at a bearable length, I have a link to a video which taught me how to deal with wide angle distortion control (click here --> YouTube)
Repeat the process once more and you should have two panoramic images, like shown below:
Repeat the process once more and you should have two panoramic images, like shown below:
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At this point you may be able to see the final image coming together, and whilst not wanting to put you off, you've just completed the easy part and now comes the blending...
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Blending
This part of the edit is very long and so I thought that I would create a timelapse of the edit from this point onwards. I could have easily written twice as much as I already have on the next section alone - because of this I will be making a future blog about blending specifically!
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Blending
This part of the edit is very long and so I thought that I would create a timelapse of the edit from this point onwards. I could have easily written twice as much as I already have on the next section alone - because of this I will be making a future blog about blending specifically!
Thanks to anybody who read this (and any other of my blogs), I hope that they are helping in some ways. I am not great at Photoshop, but am learning more and more - so I'll be updating my blog along with the shoots I do to practice new Photoshop techniques.
Feel free to comment with anything that could help both myself and any other readers.
Thank you!
Feel free to comment with anything that could help both myself and any other readers.
Thank you!
