How To Take and Merge Better Panoramic Photos Without a Tripod + Guide to Lightroom Pano Stitching

hi guys anthony turner professional photographer here and in this video we're going to talk about how to take panoramic photos not only do i love taking landscape photos in a panoramic format but it's also big business for me so in this video i'm going to share with you tips on how i take panoramic photos and how we can take a series of photos and stitch them together using software to create one seamless high resolution panorama and we'll also take a look at an alternative approach that you can use to create a high resolution pano image even if you don't own pano stitching software so let's get into it [Music] when we're lucky enough to be in front of a stunning landscape vista it's often not the stuff right at our feet or up in the sky that speaks to us but very often the visual information that we find interesting and that drew us to that scene seems to be clustered along around that horizon line so if we're able to capture that strip of maximum impact we've got a much better chance of creating a really powerful and impactful panorama for me the panoramic format is really visually pleasing and judging by the print sales on my landscape photography website my customers really like that format as well so i strongly recommend and encourage you to explore the panoramic format so how do you shoot a pano well the most basic way to do it would be just to get your camera take a shot and then crop in on a sliver through the middle of the frame now that is okay and i'm going to show you a way that you can make that work for you but it's not really the best way and the reason that it's not actually ideal is because you've got a limited number of pixels on your sensor and as soon as you're cropping in on those pixels you're throwing away data and so all the time you're losing resolution you're losing quality and yes if you don't have pano stitching software such as lightroom don't panic because i do have a method and approach that can work for you to still create high resolution files but let me show you the way that i prefer and this is the best way to get it right in camera so the actual approach to capturing the photos is really simple and by capturing a series of images that you then going to combine in software you're going to end up with a much higher resolution image to work with so ideally when you shoot a pano you can be locked off on a tripod maximum stability and you're going to be rotating about your lenses nodal point but let me let you in a little secret here i rarely do that if you have objects very close to you in your foreground absolutely that is the approach you're going to want to take let me show you you're going to need something like this attach your camera to it and it's going to rotate on your tripod and that's going to allow you to pivot around that nodal point but honestly that is a lot of faffing around and more often than not i never use this i use it to photograph the stars and that's it okay so here's the technique that i've been using successfully for many years and i've been creating large format prints up to six seven meters wide for office spaces things like that so this works guys so before you even start taking your photos what you want to do is just look at the scene in front of you observe it and actually think what do i actually want to capture within this panorama and you want to think about the edges what do i want to be on the left hand side of the frame what do i want to see on the right hand side of the frame and you can choose two objects that you're going to pan between from there when you've got an idea of your composition and where you want to take the photograph from then you want to turn yourself into a tripod basically you want to become as rock solid sturdy as you possibly can so for me that involves a comfortable yet wide and sturdy stance i'm going to brace myself i'm going to bring the camera up and i'm just going to lock in and if i can find something else that i can lean on such as a post or a pillar and actually create three points of contact so my two feet plus this item as well then we've got a tripod i bring the camera up i make sure my horizon is nice and straight i lock my body and i stop breathing and i take my first frame and from there you can start taking a series of photographs starting on the left working your way to the right overlapping each frame by about 50 percent in my mind i've noticed an object that is halfway into my frame and that is going to become the new edge of the next frame and i rotate to this new position keeping the horizon nice and parallel as i move and i take my next frame and i work through my frames until i've gone from that point that i originally thought would be one side of the frame to the other and then i have my images that i can use in my pano okay that's the basic principle of it really easy now let's talk about some of the technical aspects when i'm shooting these types of panos i like to get nice and tight along that horizon line and so if all you have is a kit lens that's fine you know you can zoom into 55 mil on this one for example but if you have access to a nice telephoto getting somewhere between that 70 to 200 range is really nice so 200 mils away you go in all seriousness i have found that that 70 to 200 range works really well for panorama stitching the camera settings that you use obviously depend on the scene that you're photographing but ideally you want to have your iso as low as you possibly can to minimize noise and if you can't do that i've got a hack for you later in the video too for landscape photography more often than not you want to have a nice deep depth of field and for my personal preference i like f8 and f11 they work really well with our shutter speed we want to make sure that we're shooting at fast enough speed that we're not getting any blurry shots and so i'd recommend that we use the one over focal length rule as an absolute minimum shutter shooting speed so what that means is if we're shooting with say a 200 millimeter lens we don't want to be shooting at anything under 1 200 of a second we want to be there or faster if you're shooting with a wider lens than that say 50 mil you can get away with a one over 50 shutter speed if you're hand holding the shots and your lens supports it i would certainly recommend turning on image stabilization and nowadays a lot of the camera bodies also have in body camera stabilization like the fuji xt4 here so if you have those turn them on they're going to help but the best quality for our editing and also to give the software the best information for actually merging the images together we want to be shooting in raw now where do you focus in the scene that's another topic all in itself but what i'd recommend if you're not really sure if there's a subject in your scene like an old farmhouse in the distance or mountains something that's actually drawn you to that panorama in the first place then by all means focus on that object if you're really not sure and you think that elements more in the foreground are just as important as those in the background then set your focus point to approximately a third of the way into the scene another option to have the maximum depth of field with the most things in your scene acceptably sharp is to use the hyper focal distance and you can download charts of hyper focal distance information from the internet and there's also apps that give you that information but if you don't want to over complicate things you want to keep it nice and simple just remember this as long as you stick to f8 f11 something around that those sort of numbers and you focus a third of the way into the scene you should be pretty good i've mentioned the three variables that make up exposure iso shutter speed aperture now all of those are going to combine to make our exposure and we want to have them locked in so make sure you switch your camera over to manual and the reason for that is we don't want any fluctuations in exposure brightness between frames so when they get merged together they unify nicely inside of the software and with that in mind we also want to make sure that our white balance is set and locked if you're shooting in raw this isn't such a big deal because obviously we can change that in post-production certainly if you're shooting in jpeg which you shouldn't be you want to make sure that you have your white balance set and locked let's quickly talk about the practicality of actually capturing these landscapes now i mentioned earlier the use of a tripod and ideally that is how you would shoot every single landscape but getting in certain locations every time with a tripod particularly a heavy one for stability just isn't always on the cards and so learning how to do this manually handheld is a really good idea now i have to be straight up with you doing it this way is going to take a little bit of practice so what i often do is i will actually do a dry run i won't even take any photos and i will just pan across the horizon line and just make sure that i can rotate and keep my camera nice and straight so within a lot of cameras nowadays they have a virtual horizon which will actually show you when the horizon is parallel so that's brilliant if your camera doesn't have one of those don't panic too much more often than not they'll have some grid lines just inside the viewfinder and what you can do with that is just turn your camera until the horizontal grid line is laying flat with the horizon line in your landscape and then use that as you rotate without a tripod your series of images isn't going to be perfect and that's okay as long as you're pretty close and it's going to take practice to get good at this but honestly it's worth the investment of time and practice one of the problems i sometimes see with my series particularly really long panos is that as i get to the end of the series i've started to actually bring the camera down in a bit of an arc and when i merge them in post-production i'll find that my horizon line starts to bow which is obviously no good so what i would recommend you do is once you've found your pano and you've done your series shoot it again just in case you made a mistake that you didn't really pick up on the first time you could do things such as you haven't overlapped enough or like me the horizon starts to bow down but if you notice that and you flick through on the back of your screen you do a bit of chimping and you go okay that's not quite right you can correct it it's better to get it right in camera and bring in the perfect raw material into the computer for that pano compositing i nearly forgot to mention this and this is quite important particularly if you're wanting to generate a nice high resolution file for that panorama rather than shooting in your landscape orientation with your camera you're better off to actually shoot in a landscape mode because all of a sudden in the height dimension we've now added megapixels we're now using the longer edge of the camera sensor to record the height of the panorama rather than the short edge so all of a sudden you're using an extra 50 of pixels from your camera sensor phew i'm glad i remembered to mention that okay let's load up lightroom and see how we actually combine these photos i was walking along a pathway towards the magnificent rocks that actually make up castle hill and i looked out towards my right and in the distance i could see this little tiny farmhouse and i could see the beautiful mountains behind and to the left of it castle hill i pulled up my camera and grabbed a basic shop i was well aware that i wanted to revisit this area later in the day because i knew that as the sun started to drop we'd start to get some really nice long shadows coming across from the rocks and so i came back to this spot i ditched my family and i grabbed this shot here on my telephoto but whilst i thought this shot was okay i really felt like the actual grandeur of the scene was being lost the camera's standard ratio 3x2 sensor just wasn't doing justice to this amazing scenery and so using the techniques that i discussed earlier i stepped into panorama photographing mode and i started to capture these series here and they range from anything from five in a series all the way up to six in a series here and the variation that you're seeing through these series that i've captured here is just a case of me waiting out the light to change on the landscape so i'll just press shift tab to get a full screen here and now what i'm going to do is click on the first photo within a series and then holding the shift key click on the last one press the n key and now i can just see those photos only and if we look at the first photograph in the series and you notice the pool here you'll notice it appears approximately half the way into this frame and look it's still present here in the second frame underlining that fact that it's good practice to overlap each frame by about 50 it just really helps lightroom to actually stitch these together much more accurately well i think this series is okay i'm not really in love with the foreground elements here and the fence line and so i'm going to come to one where i didn't actually get the fence line so i've zoomed in slightly tighter on the next series so i'm going to click on the first one shift click on the last and now i'm going to put lightroom to work merging these together into a pano and it's really easy we just right click on the series we come to photo merge and we choose panorama and now we can see an initial preview of those five photographs merged together and if we look at the top and the bottom of the frame you can see that as i've panned from left to right i've actually moved my camera up and down ever so slightly but i'm not too worried about that the most important thing is to actually keep the horizon line parallel lightroom gives us three really convenient options to fix the imperfections in our pano series so where we've got the white space here the gaps that don't have any pixels in we could do one of three things i'm going to start with the last option and work back towards my favorite so the first is auto crop and as you can see when i turn that on and i turn it off you can see that all we're doing is simply cropping away those empty pixels another really valid and useful option is just to turn on fill edges and lightroom is going to do its best to intelligently work out what should go in those missing pixels but if i zoom in here which isn't very far in this preview window but you can see we've got some random fence posts that have been added here you can see that some of the tufts of grass have also been repeated and so in some instances you can get away with this particularly if you're just wanting to replace some of the sky but personally i don't really use this option too often what i prefer to do is turn off fill edges and i come up to boundary warp and as i click this and i start moving it to the right you can see that lightroom intelligently adjusts the geometry of the individual frames so they match each other much better and you end up without any missing pixels and this is by far my favorite option within our panorama merge preview we really don't have too many options and i think that's a really good thing one of the main things we need to do is choose a projection method and all this refers to is how lightroom is going to project what you captured of a three-dimensional environment into a two-dimensional space the first option takes your photos and maps them as if they're being mapped onto a sphere the reason we don't see much of a change within this particular example is because that everything we shot is so far away when you have a lot of foreground elements which are quite close and you choose to map to spherical you will see more of a change between that and cylindrical for landscape work i tend to find that cylindrical works best and i use this option almost exclusively as we switch to perspective now you'll see that there is a slight remapping of the imagery but to be honest it's not that significant in this example again i'm going to stick with cylindrical because i found that it gives us the most realistic representation of a landscape as to what i would see when we're actually there the only two other options we've got is whether we want to turn on auto settings and that is just asking lightroom to give us a helping hand with the edit and saying hey lightroom what do you think we should do with this and if you think you might want to kickstarter with your editing by all means turn that on and if you want to create a stack inside of your library which will contain all your original images that actually made up the sequence of the panorama along with the panorama that lightroom is going to generate sat on the top of that stack check this box as well lightroom now goes to work generating our pano for us and depending on the size of the photos that you're working with and the speed of your computer will determine how long that takes here we can see the newly generated landscape has been spat out and now that landscape's all ready for us to continue editing inside of lightroom alternatively we come down right click and come to editing and choose photoshop luminar whatever other photo editing software you prefer lightroom's pano merge is super simple but we get really great results from it but one of the things that i especially love is the fact that what it spits out is a dng file so we still have all of this raw data to play with so for example if i start boosting the exposure up we should still see heaps of detail in the shadow areas here whereas if we were working on a jpeg we wouldn't have this level of detail the same goes for the highlights as well if i bring this down we've still got heaps of detail to work with so if i jump to my library module now and we come down to the dimensions here you can see we're working with a whopping 21 000 pixel width by 5472 and that's about 115 megapixels for high detail high resolution fine art printing that is absolutely perfect if you're not working with a high level of detail like this you're just not going to be able to create those beautifully detailed prints for those of you who want to give this method a go but don't have lightroom i've got a link below to a 30-day free trial so what i'd recommend you do is get hold of that give it a go for at least 30 days and send as many pano sequences as you can through their panorama stitching feature but for those of you who don't want to go through this process i've got another option for you where we can just use one of these single images and still end up with a really high resolution panorama let's suppose this is the photo that we want to create a panorama from let's say that we've decided that the bottom third of the image isn't really adding much to the photo and also the continuation of just blue sky we don't really need all of that at the top and again we're interested just in this middle third of the photo here well what we can do is come to the develop section here or you can use any software you like doesn't have to be inside of lightroom but let's suppose that we want to just crop this down here and here something like this if i double click that and come to the library module we can see that on our image height we've gone from 55 000 down to 33 000 so we've taken the nikon d850s beautiful 45 megapixel sensor and just thrown nearly half the data away well that's really not a problem if we've got topaz labs gigapixel ai all we do is load the photo into gigapixel ai and then you can see down the bottom here we have a preview that's updating on the left we're going to be left with the original photo and on the right here you can see that all of the pixelation has gone it's it's kind of mind-blowing really let's use topaz proprietary ai to take those pixels enlarge them and instead of just stretching and smearing those pixels it's actually calculated where the edges are added sharpness and you can see in the rocks here it's even added detail it's just a remarkable piece of software not only that but if you look at this little shadow area just here you can see that in the original there's a lot of noise and then look over on the right hand side it's also removed the noise as well if you're wanting to print your workout this tool is absolutely invaluable the difference between the original and what it can create for you is just night and day and you can come in and you can specify your exact width in pixels or centimeters so for example if we wanted to create a meter wide 100 centimeter wide canvas with the print industry standard 300 pixels per inch we can just set that right there and all we need to do is save the image call it something sensible click save and gigapixel ai will go to work creating your brand new file which is an infinitely better upscaled version than the original if you guys want to get gigapixel ai or the topaz labs bundle which also includes their amazing sharpen ai and denoise ai i've got the discount code ternum 15 which you guys can use through the link in the description and save yourself some money so if you're thinking about taking a slice through just a single frame to create a panorama i would strongly recommend this software and even if you just want to create nice prints of your work for me this software is a must if this video has been helpful please leave me a thumbs up and let me know what you thought in the comments and i hope that i've inspired you to start giving this panorama stitching technique a go i'll see in the next video there's one popping up on the screen right now so click that and i'll see in that one

Channel: Anthony Turnham

Views: 4,068

Keywords: Photography, Photo editing, editing, Lightroom, Photoshop, Post Processing, post production, photography editing, Adobe, Photographer, Photo education, Photography education, landscape photography, pano, panorama, panoramic photo, photo merge, photo stitching, Lightroom Classic, Adobe Lightroom, Topaz, Gigapixel AI, Sharpen AI, Denoise AI, Topaz Labs, panoramic photography

Id: G1eXE-A8ueI

Length: 19min 50sec (1190 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 26 2021