Creating a Panorama: Take & Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey: Adorama Photography TV

this week you will learn tips for creating breathtaking panoramic photographs adoramatv presents take and make great photography with Gavin Hoey where you'll learn how to take stunning photos and then polish them in post-production here's your host Gavin Hoey hello I'm Gavin Hoey and you're watching adoramatv and today I've come out into the countryside because I'm going to take a beautiful panoramic picture of this fantastic viaduct this is the ooze valley viaduct it is a huge Victorian masterpiece that spans the Sussex countryside and to do it justice I really do need to take a sequence of overlapping pictures a panorama I'm going to use my 5d mark ii and my Canon 24 to 105 millimeter lens to do the job now I've gone back a little bit from the viaduct but I haven't got a million miles back because I'm after a very specific effect I'm after an effect where this whole thing just bends and bows when we stitch it together inside a Photoshop now before I do any of that I've got to get the pictures in the bag now I'm going to start in aperture priority mode but I'm not going to take my shots there I'm gonna choose an aperture let's choose f11 I'm going to choose an IR so let's choose 200 ISO I'm going to take a meter reading from the middle of my panorama so that's going to be straight ahead of me and at those settings my camera says hour all right you want to be at 250th of a second so manual mode shutter speed 250 F aperture f11 ISO 200 so I've locked in those exact settings so every picture in this panorama will have precisely the same settings now that does mean when you take a panorama sometimes bits of your picture will look brighter or darker as you look at the individual photos but as a whole they'll join together absolutely beautifully okay so we're all set up when it comes to taking the photos there's one other really good tip overlap your pictures by 20% 30% 40% the more your overlap the better your stitch will be and the way I do it is to take a picture for example I take a picture now I can see on the right-hand side of my screen one of these pillars and when I take my next shot that pillar will appear on the left-hand side at the very next shot so it'll be on the right-hand side my next shot it'll be on the left-hand side that way I'm guaranteed a good overlap okay so we're kind of ready to go so first picture of my panorama is going to be my hand okay I'm going to take a picture of my hand why have I photograph my hand well simply when you put all the pictures together inside of your computer you'll find spotting a panorama is much trickier than you might imagine when you see a picture of your hand you'll think ah hang on all of the next pictures are all from the same panorama now what I will do is actually plan my panorama so I'll plan out the shots because this is huge in front of me and I think I can only just fit it in on the 24 millimeter end of the lens the only just so I'm going to come across like that it's got a nice firm footing because grams a bit on the unstable here and away we go okay so plan it out take a picture of my hand and take the shots so here comes shot number one and then making sure there overlap shot number two then it gets a little harder as they come into the middle and then four and then five so 180 degree panorama now having done that it's a really good idea to do it again because you never know what could go wrong so let's just take one more sequence like that start by photographing my hand and away we go so plan the route and we start over here one two three four five okay so there we go there's my little panorama completed so that's the hardest bit of shooting a panorama now I've got to do the easy bit which is to join them all together inside a photoshop and that's what we'll do as soon as I get these back to the computer okay so I'm back on the computer and this is Photoshop cs6 so here is my panoramic images that I shopped and first thing you notice there are actually six images and not five when I joined together the five images that I shot during the video recording they looked okay but the join wasn't as good as the six image panoramas that I shot just after I finished doing it so this is a reason why shooting the panoramas at least twice is a really good idea so I'm going to get my images here in mini bridge click on the first one hold shift click on the last one so they're all selected now because these are RAW files when I drag the six images and drop them in Photoshop they'll actually open up inside of Adobe Camera Raw now the images all had exactly the same exposure you can see f11 two hundred and fiftieth ISO 200 on every single image however I need to make sure that in RAW they all get exactly the same processing - otherwise the whole thing falls apart and I do it by clicking the select all button that means all of the images are now linked together so if I changed say saturation and made it black and white they all go black and white okay so everything I do will be copied onto the other images one thing I forgot to set in camera which wasn't really an oversight but it probably would have been a good idea was white balance so the white balance I've set here as daylight that means they all get the same white balance I think that's a little bit orange so I'll pour the temperature back just a tiny bit now exposure that's absolutely fine I think we nailed that in camera contrast probably have a little bit of a contrast boost we bring the highlights back to get anything out of those clouds that we can so they're not pure white and shadows where there's some lots of deep shadows here underneath the arches so let's open up the shadows quite a bit clarity well I can love clarity so we'll put clarity up a lot and vibrance let's really make those colors sing okay so that's looking much better before I open up these images I'm just going to click here on the workflow options and normally I would be on 21 million pixels full resolution but this is six images I need to open stitch and save that's going to give me a huge file and a lot of work for the computer to do so I'm going to swap to 2.8 million pixels and click OK then I'm going to press open images note its images plural with an S if its image singular you forgot to click on select all at the beginning now you also notice my panoramic is made up of upright vertical portrait formatted images now that means that when they join together I will end up with a much deeper panorama if you take your panorama z' in horizontal in landscape you end up with a really thin panorama so always shoot them in portrait format okay so there's my individual images open and we can now go to file automate and photo merge to join them together photo merge has been around forever and it really hasn't changed much in the last few versions of Photoshop layout stick with auto works pretty much every time Auto doesn't work switch to cylindrical I'll add in the open files click OK and off it goes so it'll gather up those six images and start to merge them together by looking for the overlaps and joins and lining them up it'll twist and distort the images so they all Bend and fit together nicely and it'll blend in the edges and there you go so it works really quickly and very very effectively only thing I need to do now is to get my crop tool and I'm just going to crop away the bits that I don't actually need I try and keep as much of the panorama as I can but it's just one of those things with a panorama hirama I like this you go end up cropping it here and there somewhere and I think around about there looks good ok we'll click the tick and that crops the image down now I've got a small area here on the top right corner where there's no pixels at all so let's just go to layer and we'll choose to merge the layers and then I'm going to get my spot healing brush and I'm going to turn on content-aware if it isn't already and then just fill in that area with a bit of content-aware and just let that content-aware fill it in like so it's also worth checking for any dust spots on your image as you've got that tool and you'll probably find them at one end of the the panorama or the other but probably not so many in the middle where everything's blended in together so there you go there's how you can create a panorama image from a sequence of single photographs I'm Gavin Hoey thanks for watching adoramatv is brought to you by Adorama your best source for the equipment and knowledge you need for all the latest photography video and computer gear visit adorama.com place your order by 7:00 p.m. and it ships the same day plus the next time you're in new york city be sure to visit our store located on 18th Street between fifth and sixth Avenue check out the Adorama rental company for professional cameras lighting computers and more we'll help you make the best selection to match your needs while giving you the knowledge to achieve the best outcome from your rental Adorama is your complete solution for equipment printing training and more Adorama more than a camera store you

Channel: Adorama

Views: 115,585

Keywords: Photography, adoramatv, camera, image, Hoey, adotv, flash, exposure, photoshop, adobe, gear, adorama, scenic, photo, location, outside, shooting

Id: xji5MKk-S4c

Length: 10min 35sec (635 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 09 2012