Little Planets: Ep 117 Take & Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey

[Music] in this video I'm going to show you how to shoot a 360 degree panorama and then we're gonna join it all together and create a little planet inside a Photoshop 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 they can make great photos it's brought to you by Adorama your one stop shop for all your photography needs hello I'm Gavin Hoey and you're watching adoramatv brought to you by Adorama the camera store that really does offer absolutely everything for us photographers now today I'd come out to the local village church where I live this is in the center of the village but today I'm going to turn this church not into the center of the village but into a planet in its own right yes today I'm creating a little planet effect first of all we need to take the photos and then we're going to use Photoshop to join them all together to create the final image okay before we go and take the photos let's just run through the equipment I'm going to use now to get my little planet effect I need to shoot a 360 degree panorama so a huge wide panorama so my camera of choice well it's going to be my Canon 60d and the reason for that is because of the lens I'm using today I'm going to be using my Sigma 10 to 20 millimeter lens so what am i using this lens well firstly it's extreme wide-angle lens ten millimeters is the equivalent of 16 millimeters on a full-frame camera and because it's a sigma lens you can get this lens for pretty much whatever camera brand you have and the quality is pretty damn good too I've had this one for a number of years and it survived life well life's little knocks and bumps as I've used it okay so that's the most important bit the lens now we need to do is just go and find a location set up and take the photos okay so I've picked this location for a couple of reasons the main one being that the the church is sticking very much up in the air so it's against the the skyline rather than being part and part of the skyline but also I love this path and we make our little planet this path is going to become like a motorway or a freeway straight through the middle of our planet at least that's that's what I'm seeing in my head let's see if we can actually make that happen now before we can take any photographs we need to do a little bit of work setting things up so I'm gonna be working in aperture priority mode and I'm just gonna take a general reading for my exposure so in aperture priority mode I'm gonna choose f/8 because the depth of field is well huge at a 10 millimeter lens I'll be on ISO 200 let's see what the cameras is for the shutter speed and the camera records are there a hundredth of a second so I'm going to dial those into manual f/8 one hundredth of a second ISO 200 and I'm going to lock that off now I'm going to focus up the camera ok and then I'm gonna put the camera into manual focus as well so everything's in manual settings everything's locked down except one thing and that's the white balance so I'm gonna choose a sunny white balance because well frankly that's me being optimistic it's not sunny it's freezing cold and it's even a little bit of snow in the air today but hey think on the bright side thinks honey okay so sunny white balance okay so we're good to go one last thing I'm gonna turn my camera 90 degrees to the side so I get a upright individual photographs for my little 360 degree panorama because I need to get everything in I need to make sure I get the top of the church in and not cropped off on my panorama and that might be a problem let's see okay so we're just going to go around once and take a series of photographs here we go so framing this up and I take a series of images each images has to overlap so around we go and I'm gonna work my way around really important a tripod stays rock steady doesn't move and if you want to find out more about how to do a panorama then check out adoramatv where I did I think it was the second episode where we did panoramas in detail so there's lots of information on the Adorama Learning Center and back to the beginning again now when I join those photographs together in Photoshop have a look at the end result can you see the top of the trees they've been cropped off because I haven't got enough height even on ten millimeter lens so how am I gonna get it around that well what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take two panoramas and join them all together so I'm actually going to shoot with my camera not angled at 90 degrees like it is here but using the the tripod head that I've got there's a little little sort of lever on the side and that allows me to tilt my camera up and down so I'm gonna tilt it up 20 degrees in the air and we're gonna take the same panorama again so let's go okay so around we go let's start here two three and back to the beginning and what I end up with is a well a panorama that shot up in a high angle but of course there's not very much foreground so now all I'm going to do is I'm going to tilt this 20 degrees in the other direction and I'm gonna run it round again so around we go same starting point at around we go now again during this process make sure your tripod doesn't move the less movement you can get from your tripod the better so around we go and obviously make sure that your individual photographs overlap and then back to the beginning so what I've got there are two rows of panoramas but Photoshop will be able to handle that absolutely fine both rows got exactly the same exposure both rows overlap top and bottom and side to side so all we need to do now is to get these photographs into Photoshop and join them together and we're gonna do that right now so the first thing we need to do is just make a standard panorama so let's open up all of the images that we shot for our panorama got a file automate and photo merge and on photo merge here I'm just going to use the auto button because it basically it works every single time I'm also just going to open the files sometimes you might need to tick geometric distortion correction if you have a problem with it joining together if your panorama doesn't quite stitch correctly then that's a good one to use similarly if it doesn't work on auto try the cylindrical option but just give it a moment or two and this will create our complete 360 degree panorama plus a little bit extra and we'll look at how we get rid of that in a moment okay so there we go here it comes nearly there and there's our 360 degree panorama okay let's go to layer and then we'll merge the visible layers so we get rid of the individual layers and just end up with one single image now we've shot a 360 degree panorama but it's actually slightly wider but it if we join this together as a little planet we'd have a problem with repeating edges you can see the trees here for example are the same trees as on the other side just here so we need to make sure that the right edge is exactly the same as the left edge and I do that by going to filter other offset and I'm just gonna offset it well it doesn't really matter how much but it that just brings what was the edges in towards the center and now what I can do is get my rectangular marquee and I'm just gonna drag out a little rectangular selection and I can see that the well that bit here is also the same as this bit here so that's enough of an area just to copy and paste across and I'm actually not gonna copy it's gonna be edit and cut because what I want is a very clean edge and then edit and paste and there's another clean edge and what I need to do is move that edge you across and we've got to line everything up so let's just drop the opacity down we'll go and have a little close look here use the keyboard arrow keys the cursor keys just to nudge things into place now it's not gonna be a perfect alignment you will find there is a slight error there and that's that's caused by a couple of things it's caused by the the panoramas stitching software which will just move things slightly but also because when we were taking the pictures it wasn't a fast process so there may have been a little bit of movement either camera movement or movement in the breeze so you kind of expect that I'm gonna get rid of that hard jagged by using the eraser tool but notice I'm going nowhere near that sharp edge we need to keep that sharp edge nice and sharp bigger areas I can deal with with a larger eraser brush and we're just blending it together so we get a constant coverage of image so you could literally can't see the joint okay now I can definitely see the join here and that's important we're gonna need that join in a second but let's go to layer and we'll merge this down again so we're back to one single layer now we've got the excess area here and we can get rid of that excess area simply by making a selection of that area so it's going nice and tight make sure we get right up to the edge right up to the very edge of the pixels there and come down okay so there we go that'll be enough okay and then we can go up to edit and cut that area out and that's gonna give us a very clean edge and it'll be exactly the same edge as on the other side so now we can actually make a 360 degree panorama that is pixel perfect all we have to do is go back to filter go back to other go back to offset and we'll offset it again doesn't matter how much the same amount we'll be fine we've got these large checkerboard areas left and right and we get rid of those really easy I like this bit let's go to image trim and we'll trim based on transparent pixels okay and that trims it down lovely so now the left and right will match up perfectly okay we got a few transparent pixels top some bottom now you could clone those out if you wish but I've got enough depth here that I can just crop those away so we'll just carefully crop those away trying to leave her a reasonable amount we don't have crop too much if we can possibly get away with it okay so that looks pretty good just have a quick look make sure you haven't left any transparent holes there's a small one there for example so we'll just clone that out with a spit of Spot Healing there we go okay and now all we need to do is to make our little planet and our little planet is made by going up to image and down to image size and on image size make sure constrain proportions is unpicked and I'm going to put a width of 3,500 pixels and a height of 3,500 pixels yes I'm making a square image it looks a bit weird but don't worry that's fine it's gonna get worse before it gets better let's go to edit transform and we'll rotate this 180 degrees so it's upside-down and to make the little planet we use filter then we use distort polar coordinates rectangular to polar as the option there and hit the ok' button and there it is there is my little planet all I need to do is just flip it around so let's use a bit of free transform and we'll rotate my planet around and spin it wherever I like about there looks good so the final touch is just to fill in the edges where you have a slight checkerboard pattern coming through so all I'm gonna do is I'm just going to select a foreground color that is the same as that color around the edge which is just a light gray and then I'll paint it in with the paintbrush so just get a paintbrush and we'll just paint that area in now you could do something like using the clouds filter just to create your own little clouds in there it all depends on the sky that you have in your photo that's a nice at a quick way of getting your little planet to have a nice neat sky so the last thing to do is just go in nice and close have a really close look hopefully you shouldn't see any lines or joins but if you do if you get a little sort of 1 or 2 pixel join just use the clone tool or the Spot Healing Brush to remove it but mine looks pretty good can't see any joins excellent I do have this sort of pinched area in the middle and I'm just gonna use the Spot Healing Brush just to tidy that up with a little bit of new pixels going in there and not sure that one worked for me so let's just try that again there we go yeah and that's lovely and that hopefully will give me the effect of my little kind of motorway freeway going through the middle of my my little plan like so so there you go there's how you can create your very own little planet using a 360 degree panorama and a bit of fun inside a Photoshop now if you've enjoyed this video and you want to see more videos from Adorama the amazing camera store people then don't forget to click on the subscribe button and subscribe so you get a regular video I'm Gavin Hoey thanks for watching take and make great photography 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 5th and 6th 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 [Music]

Channel: Adorama

Views: 59,608

Keywords: photography;, tips;, tutorial;, adorama, tv;, adoramatv;, adotv;, adorama;, review;, camera, Canon, Digital, mobile device, panorama, photography, photo tips, Photoshop

Id: 8ffmm8wIn5Q

Length: 14min 51sec (891 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 19 2013