The EASIEST way to SHOOT and STITCH PANOS + A Lightroom Secret

a big thanks to squarespace for sponsoring this week's video can you see me okay in this video what i'm going to do is show you how that you can stitch images together to create something that's over 100 megapixels like this [Music] so the detail on this is just so incredible morning everybody fantastic to see you all again so i've had so many questions about this image that i took a couple of weeks ago in the lake district where i mentioned that i'd stitched 14 or 15 images together and everyone asked me how i did it you know what what techniques i used and i thought it'd be really good to do a video and explain exactly how i did it because it's something i do all the time to create all sorts of different types of images um not just panoramas and yeah it's a super simple technique and there's a real simple trick as well in lightroom that probably not a lot of people know about that i'll tell you towards the end of the video and also i often stitch photos that aren't just panoramas you know the classic panoramas like this one from the pharaoh islands or this one from the lake district you know quite often um stitching photos that look like they could have been taken by a normal camera like this one here from turidon and this one here from the pharaoh islands which is more of a vertical pano so basically you can stitch just about anything but how do you do it so what i want to do is go through what tools i use how i do it in the field and how i edit the final image as well and it's all really really easy to do so before i do that let's talk about why i do it so the first one the obvious one is panos like these where the more that letterbox type short where you've taken maybe five to ten images horizontally and you've stitched them together to create a pano that's the obvious one but there are lots of other reasons to stitch images together so for instance sometimes when i'm shooting a scene like this one here from toridon and i've got just like maybe just a little bit more um information that i need on the left and right and i don't actually want to go wider because then i'd have to crop the top and bottom which is probably fine on my z7 that's got 45 megapixels but if you've got a 20 24 megapixel camera then you don't want to lose those megapixels so by staying at the same focal length and just moving the camera left and right and grabbing some more information is a really good way of just stitching it together and creating um a better quality image i do that quite a lot of the time both horizontally and vertically which i'll get to later the other thing is you know you want to just get a higher resolution image maybe you want to print it higher resolution or maybe you want to crop in afterwards so take this shot here when i was in the lake district shooting down on this amazing sort of mist in in the valley here uh i've spoken about this image before but it but what's good about it is that you can crop in and get lots of different compositions from this one image so you know being able to do panos this ended up being a 300 megapixel um triple layer pano so um yeah you can do really quite clever things with with your images okay so what do you need what what do you need to actually do this well your hands basically um you know the base the most basic form of it is just shooting a panorama with your hands and you'll be amazed at how often i do that uh you know all these images here have all been taken as handhold panoramas and if you've got reasonable amount of light especially with ibis then you know you can shoot down to maybe a 10th 15th of a second and get super sharp images and then the other way of doing it is doing it on a tripod now if you're doing it on a tripod then you need to make sure your tripod's level you can obviously level it with the legs but that's fairly cumbersome to do so what i use is i just use one of these leveling heads here you can just stick that on your tripod it's not that it doesn't add much weight and it just makes it much easier to level your ball head because it's your ball head that's got to be level um not the top of your ball head the bottom of the ball head and what this allows you to do you can see there's a level on it here and you can just loosen it off and it's really easy just to level it when it's on your tripod um so yeah it's a really good thing i definitely pick it up the link to this is the benro one is in the description the other thing you can get for your tripod is a nodal head i've never used a nodal head but what that basically does is it means that the nodal point of your lens is on the pivot point that you're moving around and it means that you don't get any parallax error so it's good if you're doing wider angle shots and and to make the stitching easier but to be honest i've never had a problem with any of the things that i've done not using one of those so i don't think you need one and then how do you do it when you're in the field so if we just go for the basic version which is the handheld version then what you need to do is you need to find the scene that you want to shoot like i was in the lake district doing this one and then all you need to do is um shoot in portrait and then make sure that you expose for the highlights of of your scene um and if you've got a lot of dynamic range across the scene which quite often you might have then make sure you take multiple exposures on each shot and what i tend to do if i'm doing that is i just set my camera to shoot three or five exposures usually a two-third of a stop and one and a third stop above and the same below and then when you click the shutter button it just takes those five or three shots and then all you do is you just move around making sure that you're overlapping each shot by 50 percent and just taking the shot the key is to make sure that you're following the horizon level so what i tend to do is i look for a point that i think in my scene that's that's the same level the same point above the horizon and if you haven't got a horizon like the seascape then what i tend to do is work out roughly um where that might be on the scene and i keep one of the grid lines on my camera on that point as i go around you don't have to get it exactly right but it just means the stitching isn't wonky afterwards i never get it perfect but it's usually good enough and then if you're doing it vertically then you just overlap vertically as well i tend to do more wider angle ones vertically it tends to be when i've got a wide angle lens and i can't quite get enough sky in and i'll just do a shot down below um of the foreground and i'll do another shot of the sky it's also good you can dual purpose that as well and stack it as a focus stack and a pano so it allows you to do two things in one if you if you're doing that with a wide angle lens in terms of focal length and i usually use between 30 and 60 millimeters um you don't really want to go much wider than 30 although obviously you can i just mentioned i do it sometimes but but usually between 30 and 60 because you usually in these types of shots i haven't got any foreground you've only got mid ground and distance so 30 millimeters to 60 millimeters is a good range you can go above that as well but you just need to take a lot more shots to get to get the scene in and i usually shoot the best aperture for the lens because again i don't really care too much about depth of field usually so i'm usually shooting around about 8 on my lens and then the other thing i mentioned is don't use a polarizer because the polarizer will create some strange effects when you're going across a wide expanse of sky so i'd avoid using a polarizer okay onto the secret trick that you can do that maybe you didn't know in lightroom and that that is exactly what i did on this shot that i took in the in the late district and why i ended up with so many images is you can do dual layers of stacks as well so i can shoot maybe five or six shots across move down and then shoot back across the other way and lightroom is really clever it just stitches them together you don't have to worry about it as long as you've overlapped them by around about sort of 35 to 50 percent then it just works it all out and it just stitches it all together and it is really good i've never had any issues with it so that means that you can just create an even bigger file and and create something that then doesn't look like a pano because you've got more more data below the image and above the image but you're effectively just doing a wider field of view and creating a lot more megapixels okay i'm going to grab my computer and we'll look at lightroom and how we stitch these together once we've got them once we've taken them and got them in the lightroom right so i've got lightroom in front of me now and what i'm going to do is just show you that shot from the lakes so you can see here that i've got lots of images that i took just moving to the to the side every time i did it and i probably overlapped it by about 60 here and you can see at this point i move down and then move back across and if i select all those now i probably should i've done uh an exposure stack as well so i probably each image i should have taken uh an image that was two-thirds or a stop brighter and two-thirds or a stop um darker but i didn't because i was rushing because the light was changing really quickly but it's fine the dynamic range of the nikon is amazing and and it's come out fine so all you do is select those images and right click and then you just click photo merge panorama if i'd have got a shot if i'd have got some different exposures for each of those images i click hdr panorama and that would create the image with a lot more a lot broader dynamic range as well which you would then be able to use as you're editing it and the thing to remember here is i'm using raw images and the output file is raw so it doesn't create a jpeg image it doesn't create a tiff it creates a dng image which is a raw image which you can then edit just as you're editing these raw images so i don't edit any of these images before i do this stack i always do the edit after to the stack so i crack click panorama and that then goes and creates this panorama and preview once it's doing that i can talk briefly about the spherical cylindrical and perspective and parts of this the spherical is just think of a ball like that and the images are going to fit to the inside of a ball that works quite well if you've got a maybe a 360 or you've got something that's a bit wider and you've got more sky and more [Music] foreground i usually use cylindrical and that usually works quite well you can see that this is this is okay and what it shows you then is the image now i never click auto settings because you want to edit it yourself afterwards and it creates this horrible hdr looking image you can click auto crop or you can crop it afterwards it doesn't really matter whatever you do there you can change afterwards anyway fill edges basically what it does is it does a content-aware fill on all the white areas on this it's probably going to do that okay but you've got to be careful if you've got twigs branches or anything like rock detail there where it's not going to do a great job of it because this is sky and then some dark areas i think using fill edges it will do a really good job of making that more usable space for me however having said that i probably would have been fine anyway so once you've done that you click merge and it creates an image and this is that image that it created and then i've gone along and edited that image and you can see that the the detail in it is spectacular i can zoom in and you can see i'm looking at a tiny area here and it is so amazing the quality of the of the image with when it's stacked like this so i wanted to i've just got some news on this image as well but before i i say that i wanted to just mention squarespace that have sponsored this midweek video thanks a lot squarespace if you're looking for a website or a domain then make sure you go to squarespace.com and if you're ready to purchase it then you can go to squarespace.com forward slash nigel to get 10 off or use offer code nigel now i also have uploaded this image into my portfolio with squarespace and i've created a code using squarespace because it's super easy to do that called pano 30 which gives you 30 off if you're really interested in this image because i've had quite a few people message me saying you should put it in your portfolio i've spent the sort of week with it and i've edited it quite a lot and just tweaked it a little bit i printed out a small version as you saw in last week's video um and yeah i i'm really really happy with it i think it definitely deserves a place in my portfolio so i'm adding it in there it will look amazing printed big this image because there's so much detail and any image that i've got that's a pano on my website then you can get 30 off with the offer code pano30 that's it thanks ever so much for watching and until sunday when i'm going to be in wales actually so you'll see a video from wales on sunday um back out in the field which is great news um back out with my campervan as well thanks a lot for watching and bye oh i've just remembered um somebody asked because i'm not doing a bit this is probably the last midweek video i'm going to do for a while is the 2020 nd um still going on instagram yes it is i still look at them and i'll still either post some things on instagram about those images or i'll post some winners from those images on a monthly basis probably on my sunday video so make sure you keep publishing your images to 2020 nd as much as anything it's a great place and a great community to be able to share images from people that are interested in landscape photography okay [Music] bye [Music]

Channel: Nigel Danson

Views: 70,974

Keywords: photography, panorama, stitch, stitching photos, how to make a panorama, how to, photography tips, photography tricks, lightroom, lightroom panorama

Id: 9LjPJt9OShQ

Length: 14min 45sec (885 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 29 2020