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Panoramic Images

Lesson 12 from: Photo Editing in Lightroom Classic for The Photo Enthusiast

Jared Platt

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Lesson Info

12. Panoramic Images

Learn how to combine Panoramic images in Lightroom Classic’s Library Module. You will be surprised at how you can use the Panoramic Merge in Lightroom.
Next Lesson: HDR Images

Lesson Info

Panoramic Images

So before we go any further, I need to talk about two tools. Uh first is panoramic photos and the second is HDR and the HDR is even more important, but uh since we're talking about HDR, we'll talk about panoramic as well. So, panoramas allow us to take a wider shot than we have a lens. And and the best way to take a panoramic photo is vertically. So instead of shooting wide like this horizontally, so it's a it's a short frame with a wide shot, like maybe something like this, you wouldn't you wouldn't want to shoot this horizontally and then turn your camera and shoot horizontally and turn your camera and shoot horizontally because the bend of the lens is greater this way than it is this way. And so we want to turn the camera vertically. That's the first thing when taking a panoramic photos, we're going to turn the camera vertically. And then the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna try and overlap that by about 30%. Even 50% would be great. So each image successive image needs to o...

verlap by about 30% at least. So a third of the image overlap. And that allows the computer to do a lot of stitching and that's what what it's going to need to do. So what I've done is I've done a series of vertical images because I just didn't have enough width to do it. Plus it gives you a much higher resolution image. So I'm just gonna scroll through these images and see how far do I want to go, I don't really care to have the house in there all that much. So I'm gonna start there and then go to about there. Um and that's gonna be my panoramic image. So I'm going to highlight all of these images and I'm going to go into the grid and right click them and then I'm going to go to photo merge panorama and once I've got it in panorama I've got three options. Fear Ical cylindrical and perspective perspective is only useful when you're in a position where you actually have some pretty serious perspective. And so you'll know when you reach that point, spherical. On the other hand is the idea that it's almost like you're in a sphere. And since you're shooting vertically, the the bend of the lens goes up above you like this and down below you like that. And so that just think of yourself in a sphere. And as you spin through that sphere, you would see this wrapping image around below and above you. And that's kind of the idea. So most things are spherical. However, the cylindrical is a lack of bow, so it's not going like this, it's straight so you would only think of cylindrical as if you were shooting a panorama with a very long lens shooting at something, way, way, way away from you and you were just kind of doing this because there's no bo over the top of you and so, but you're in a cylinder, no top, no bottom, it's just a flat surface around like this. So those are the three different methods, there's spherical with a bend over the top and bottom. There's cylindrical with no top, no bottom, it's just straight and flat. And then there is perspective which uh takes into account perspective of like lines, vanishing points and things like that. So just be aware that there are three different types. You can always click between them. So if you click between them it will rebuild it and show it to you a little bit differently in this case it doesn't seem to change it all that much. But if I did perspective, it would change it quite a bit. So once we've chosen our selected projection then we're going to deal with the boundary issues. So these boundaries have all these white edges and that's just a result of the computer having to warp. So lightroom has to warp all these images in order to stitch them together correctly. And once it's done that results in all these white edges. And we can do two different things with it. We can either make a boundary warp which basically just stretches the images until they fill the entire area. So watch what happens as I boundary warp. It's just gonna keep bringing that and it's just stretching the image and it looks absolutely fine that way. So that's probably our best option. It's just a boundary warp all the way. Sometimes you'll notice when you do a boundary warp that the the horizon line will start bending in weird ways. So if that's the case then you'll have to not do the boundary warp and instead use this fill edges option. And when you do that it actually is going to replicate whatever is near it, the sky, the water, the bushes and it's going to build out with content aware fill it's gonna build out the edges and in this case it will do a pretty pretty good job because all of these edges are fairly amoebic shapes so you can see the water looks great, the sky looks great. The house even looks okay. So everything's fine. So let's just go with Phil edges so that we don't even have to deal with the boundary warping. And then we can tell it to create a stack. So it's going to take all of those pieces of our panel and it's going to put them together and it's gonna stack this one on top. So let's go ahead and merge this and it's going to create our panel and create our stack and then we can work on that image. And the great thing about doing a panoramic image inside of Lightroom as opposed to like inside of your camera is that Lightroom is going to create a raw panoramic image as opposed to your camera which is creating a jpeg panoramic image which is not a good idea. And so this is the perfect way to create a panoramic image. So now we have a panoramic image which is almost 10,000 pixels wide And it's stacked on top of all of the original image is ready for us to work on it. But it is 256 MB. So it's a very large file but it could be printed huge. So that's one of the advantages of doing a panoramic image. Now keep in mind that a panoramic image doesn't necessarily just need to be horizontal. It can also be vertical or it can be a grid pattern. So you can you can actually stitch a grid together and that'll work as well. Um and you can even do this and this is the most amazing thing. So I was traveling up a tram. So we're going up a mountain in the alps in a tram and I wanted to get a feel for this mountain. So I'm I'm looking at the mountain and see how I'm moving, I'm moving up this, I was actually moving up the mountain. So we were here like this and we're moving up the mountain like this and I wanted to get a feel for it. So I took a whole bunch of images and I thought I wonder if I can stitch together a panorama and what would happen. And so I'm going to stitch this together for you. Right click it merge panorama and watch what happens. Light room is so good that it actually stitches together a panorama even when things are moving, which means that there's parallax happening. So the mountain is moving and the lake is moving behind the mountain. And even with all of that, it does a perfect job at creating a panoramic. Now I had to work really hard, look at all the bends and everything that happened to it in order to make that happen. So it actually did an amazing job at stitching together a panorama even while I was moving and things were moving in relationship to each other in a parallax kind of way. And so this is an impressive thing for a panoramic stitcher to do. And so in this case, rather than bending it or filling the edges, I can also just auto crop it and boom, that's what my panoramic image will look like and no one will ever know that I didn't just have a really wide lens and took this in one shot

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Ratings and Reviews

Byron Sieber
 

Jared does an excellent job at taking a subject and breaking it down step by step. He includes great explanations along the way to help you understand why he is doing something. His results, which are great photos, speak for themselves.

user-814d7a
 

Excellent class with great detail on the new Masking tools! Thanks, Jared!

Michael Grosso
 

Excellent overview of the features included in the most recent upgrade of Adobe Lightroom. Very practical applications are covered at a very good pace. Thank you!

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