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Panorama Stitching

Well, this is panorama stitching. So talk about shooting, stitching and optimizing panoramas. Eso first. I just have a little kind of gallery of little panoramas have shot over the years. Here are a few from Africa and when you shoot panoramas, if you don't think about it at the time you're shooting if you just click him away and expect Photoshopped deal with it later you're gonna end up running into a lot of problems because your cameras exposure meter is gonna change based on what's currently in the viewfinder. And if you have a son in one spot of your panorama and you have shaded somewhere else, your meter is going to be going all over the place, giving you brighter and darker shots and they're not gonna match. So the first thing they're gonna end up doing when I end up capturing a panorama is I will end up being either in manual exposure mode or I will do exposure lock. So I happening is a canon camera. In on the back of my canon, there is a button that looks like an ass tricks. An...

d if I press it just once and let go, then right down by my exposure settings. They'll be in Asterix, and it means that they're locked. It's the cooling to being in manual mode temporarily, where it's not gonna vary for the next few frames you take and Onley. Once you either press the button again or you spend, I don't know what ifs of its 30 seconds or some time frame. Would it automatically turn itself off? So that's one of the things I first consider is trying to use manual exposure to get a pretty consistent brightness across my entire frame. So I end up picking out what I think is the most important part of the scene or the part of the scene that would be the most difficult to expose for. Sometimes that's where the sun is, because I don't want that whole area to end up being blown out solid white and other times it's some other detail in a picture like if there's a person standing there something and I'll get the exposure right for them, and then I'll either be in manual mode or I'll hit that little button to lock in my exposure. Second thing to think about when shooting in Panorama is your focus. If your focus is set to auto focus, then each time you press the shutter, it's going to try to refocus. And if in some shots you have trees that are close to the camera, it's gonna focus close and then another shots. If you have just far away mountains, it's gonna Farkas. Farkas is gonna focus far away, and so, ideally, I would end up switching it over to manual focus. I might use auto focus to actually get the focus and then just click the lens over to manual just for the length of time I'm gonna do my panorama. And then there's a bunch of different things to think about when doing this. First off, when I shoot a panorama, I almost always shoot my panorama, starting on the left, if at all possible. And then I pan towards the right as I shoot the additional frames. And the only reason for that is because later on, I'm gonna have to view the end result, and I'm either going to view it here in bridge, which is one of them right now or in adobe Light room. And when I do that, it's going to show the images in the same sequence they were shot in, and the next image that was shot will always be shown to the right of the previous to the right to the right. And if I move my camera to the right, each time I change which image I'm capturing, then if you look at the top row here, you notice that if you just glance at this, it looks like a scene that could be stitched together. It looks like they belong together. Will. The bottom line is the exact same capture just captured in the opposite order, starting on the right edge of the scene in panning towards the left. So it's much more difficult to recognize that that's a panorama when I'm viewing the image in bridge or in light room. So if it all practical, I started the left edge of the scene and I scan towards the right just because that's the order that they're going to be displayed when it seem Enbridge or light room. If I go the opposite direction, the problem is sometimes I end up coming back and reviewing my shots, and I see that I took this picture and I'm like, Well, what's the big deal about that picture and I'll throw it away and then I may look at this one and go Well, I missed that one. Cut off the rainbow, throw it away, and then after a while I might realize that there was a panorama there, but I've already thrown away a few pieces of it. So if for some reason it's not practical for me to start on the left side, in pan towards the right, what'll end up doing this. I actually put my hand in front of the camera lens, and I'll point my finger in the direction of about two. Scan across to do my panorama. And when I'm done with the panorama, I'll take a picture of my fist. And therefore, when I look at my images in here, if I ever see a picture of my hand, it will usually be pointing left meaning about the scam left with my panorama and I'll know a panorama starting. And when I see a picture of my fist, I know it ended in that way. I never end up throwing away the images, thinking that they're not good as individual shots I recognize it's definitely a panorama if I go through that process Makes sense. All right. Well, a couple other things when actually trying to capture the panorama. I haven't actually a camera set up here and put it up on the table. Uh, it's very easy to shoot Panorama. Is that end up going up or down hill and end up with stuff that's just not very usable. And so let's show you a little example of this here I was in. Can't remember if this is Iceland or it looks like could be Alaska, one of the two. And you see, my panorama is kind of going uphill at the end or this one really long, one from Alaska and a little dip in the middle. Ah, this one, though, is pretty good. I mean, it was able to get it just right, and the only reason I'm able to do those really wide panoramas without getting these dips is to make sure that whatever part of the camera rotates is level. So if I look on my set up, I have kind of a funky set up in here. But for most people, the part of their camera that's going to end up rotating is the part of the base of their ball head right here. That's where if I loosen up one little, uh, setting here, that's for my camera. Rotates well, most of the time that part of your set up will have a bubble level sitting there. And so what I need to do is level that bubble level to make sure that when I rotate my camera around, this is not going downhill on one edge and up on the other. Because otherwise this is gonna be scanning down and back up as I go across. So you can do that by adjusting your camera legs. Or if you do, a lot of Panorama is you can add a special addition here, which I have, and it's known as a leveling center column. Usually you can get one with a center column that comes down like most tripods have. And with this little guy, what I do is I just loosen it up and then I can move this around without having to deal with legs, and I'm looking at a bubble level right now. I get that level and I can lock it off. And so that way you can leave the legs. However, they were originally set up. And just loosen that one little part and be able to level this. So if you do a lot of panoramas, that thing there is a great accessory. A bunch of different manufacturers make them. This particular tripod is made by a company called really right stuff, and they make a matching leveling accessory. If you have one from get so or one of the other brands, they also make them. So if you do, a lot of Panorama is that would be nice, but that's not enough to make it just right. The other thing we need to do is make sure the camera itself is level, because right now, if you look at my camera one of about to rotate it, it doesn't look level to me. So I would loosen up my ball head and I would try to get my camera level a couple different ways of doing that. One is you can slide a little bubble level in the hot shoe up here or on some cameras like this one. If I turn it on, it has an electronic level in it. When I turned electronic level on, I see a line in the back of the screen which will turn green when this is actually level modern. Some modern cameras will have that others won't. And so I could do that. If you get both the top of your camera to be level and you get the area where it's gonna rotate around to be level, then when you end up panning craft your panorama, you're not gonna be going downhill or uphill. And you're not gonna end up with stuff like this, uh, image we have here. If you're not very good at leveling and you just don't have the gear or the the mindset toe, get in there and do it. The main thing is, I would say is don't crop your image tightly in the viewfinder, then leave a lot of space some out so that if it is off a bit, you have enough space to crop a bit out because you captured a lot more than you really need it. Now, if you're gonna shoot a whole bunch of panoramas and I do a lot of them, then you might want a different set up than this. I actually used a different ball head the vast majority of time. I'm shooting this ball head of my wife's. I'm gonna change this ball head out for the kind that I use, which I find to be absolutely ideal for panoramas. Uh, this particular set up, I have has a quick change mechanism here where I could just change ball heads really easily. That's not usually the case usually done to a Bolton. Undo your your tripod head. I could just take a quick release off of there, switch over to this and then I put my camera on this. This is my normal set up for shooting 98% of the time you see me in the field, this is what's there. So with this, I use a combination of the levelling center column to level the part of my camera that's gonna rotate, Lock that down. And now this is incapable of being out of level because I can't tilt the camera this way. It's just the head is incapable of that. And I have one knob here in the end, that's allows me to pan and it's really nice and smooth and I could move it toe small amounts. And then if I need to be tilted up or down at all I can do it is a separate adjustment, and I can do panoramas very easily with that set up. Also, if I need to cover a huge area and I want a very high resolution picture, I could point the camera up first, do a panorama, then bring it down a little bit and do another. Bring it down a little bit and do another, and it's much easier to do that. Then, when you're on the ball head, where every single direction can move when you loosen up the ball head. And so this is my preferred shooting set up. It's not at all a requirement, but if you happen to get overly into panoramas and you're shooting them all the time, then this is amazing Set up. This particular one is made by a company called really right stuff, Andi. If you go onto their website, you would find information about shooting panoramas, and it would include this item. Now let's talk a little bit more about we need to think about when shooting you need to decide if you want to shoot in a horizontal or vertical orientation because it does make a big difference. Portrait versus landscape kind of Set Up If you set your camera on landscape wars, orientation the horizontal orientation, then if you look at this particular scene that I'm capturing the number of shots it might take to go across that area might be 1234567 So if you take the resolution of your camera and multiplied by seven, that's the total amount of information it's gonna capture. Taken. Try to capture the same image, but turn your camera vertically in a portrait mode. And then it's gonna take mawr images to capture the full range of that panorama because you're capturing a smaller slice of it vertically and you're gonna end up with MAWR shots. So when you stitch them together, you're gonna end up with a larger and result mean if you want to make much larger prints, then you might want to think about oriented here camera vertically instead of horizontally. I gotta be careful with that, though. You end up with so many shots and so huge of files that if you never plan a pregnant big, you're just wasting, Ah, lot of space on your hard drive, a lot of extra processing time and Photoshopped in all that. But if you're really thing is to get the biggest reproduction, you can set your camera to a vertical orientation. When you do your panorama, when you're going across your panorama, you want to overlap your frames at least by 1/3. But I often do by 1/2 because I find oftentimes it's hard for me to see in the viewfinder if I'm going all the way around. And sometimes I don't I'm not all that accurate and getting 1/3. If you ever have less than you need, then you gotta throw away the panorama because it's just not going to stitch. So I find it a little better to overcompensate and standardized on near 1/2 overlap when you're shooting, it also matters what lens you use. So as far as what lens used, let's take a look at it here. I'm at a place called Cadillac Ranch in Cadillac Ranch has 10 Cadillacs from the 19 fifties. I think it's one from each year they're buried nose first into the ground in the middle of a cow pasture. It's kind of weird, but it's near Amarillo, Texas, and this is a shot of the entrance gate to Cadillac Ranch. Now, if you look through the entrance gate into the distance, you might see 10 little bitty specs. They're showing up right in this thing area here, those of the 10 Cadillacs, but you see how far away they feel. That's because I'm using a wide angle lens Any time you use a wide angle lens, the difference, or the distance visually between near and far objects is gonna be exaggerated. They're gonna feel much further away as you go for a wider and wider angle lens. If I switch on the other hand to a telephoto lens, much longer lens, then in order to keep the majority of the gate in there, I'd back up maybe back about a semi truck length behind me, because once it zoomed in with that lens, I could only see a portion of the gate. But in doing so, any time you go for a telephoto lens, it compresses visually the space between near and far objects. And so if you have a mountain that's really far away that you think looks amazing. And you have some near object as well. And you want the to to really look great together. A telephoto lens is gonna help to pull that mountain and make it feel much closer to the nearby subject compared to if you grab a wide angle lens where that mountain will feel so far away that you can't even tell us there even though you're I you thought it was pretty special, nobody else would even notice it in the shop. So when I get a telephoto lens, if I want to capture this, I can't fit the whole gate in my view. So I'm just gonna end up panning my lens left to right and stitching a panorama to get the wider view. Then let's talk about let's say you've captured your panorama. Use manual focus, used either manual exposure or your lock your exposure. You got your head level in all of that. So you're you know, you got a good you did at least 1/3 overlap, possibly 1/2 overlap. And now you've captured it. You got it into bridge or light room. And now we want a prep it for stitching. There are some things that I do before stitching images together, and what I'll end up doing is I'll click on the first image of my panorama. I'll hold the shift key and click on the last image of the panorama to get all the images. And then I'll go up to the file menu and choose opening camera. If you have more than one image selected when you choose open and camera, it's gonna open them and show them his thumb announced on the left side of the camera dialogue box. But any changes you make to the sliders on the right are Onley gonna affect those images that are currently selected over on the left and right now only the first ones selected. So if I make a change like I don't know, bring the saturation all the way down, you can see in the thumbnails only the top one changed, not the others. So what I want to do is before I start making changes to those sliders, I want to scroll through these images in pick where I think the most important were most challenging part of the panorama is, as faras optimization goes, it could be here where we got a really bright parts because of the sun, where it could be where there's a person standing, cause that's the most important part of the subject matter. But I'm gonna try to find that area, states there, and then before I experiment with the sliders on the right, I'll hit the select all button that will make it so all the images air selected. So if I make any kind of a change like here, I'll bring the saturation all the way down again. You'll see all the images on the left changing in that way any changes I make to optimize the image or applied identically across all the pictures, and therefore they should still match, and they should still take stitched together rather well, a couple things that I always do when optimizing an image. Prepping it for stitching a panorama is I always adjust white balance because my camera, I usually have set to auto white balance, and that means one of scan across the panorama. It might be changing the white balance setting the whole time is I'm going across there. If there is a warm colored porchlight over on one side of the panorama. The camera's gonna pick up that it's this yellowish orange light, and it's going to shift the way it captures color. If I go to another part of the panorama and it's just all darkened in the shade, no general light source, it's gonna be a different white balance setting. So the minimum that I'm gonna dio is click on the white balance and just to up Arrow Key and down Arrow Key for both temperature and tint. What that's gonna dio is just make sure they're all consistent because the numbers that are usually in there could be all over the place. And by just doing up and down arrow key, they're all gonna be consistent. But in the end, I usually just try to optimize the picture. Now these images here R J pegs. Usually I'd be shooting and raw format because with raw format, you get a lot more out of your images. The only reason these air J pegs is because I probably have 100 pictures and all the folders were using for this class, and if I ended up carrying around 100 raw files all the time because these are always on my hard drive for demo purposes. They just take up a lot of space. So I'm using J pegs here just so Photoshopped runs fast, and I can keep these files on my hard drive with my drive filling up. But if this was truly I just come back from shooting these, they be raw files. Eso I just white balance and one of the other things they do is up here at the top. There is a choice that's supposed to look like the glass elements that make up a lens, that one. And if I click there, there's a choice called Enable lens profile Corrections. What that's going to do is it's gonna look and see if it can figure out what lens you shot this with. And usually your camera attach is that information to the files. So it it just looks at some text that's attached to your image. Notice metadata, and it will try to compensate for distortion that the lens cost in the image. And so when you turn that on, oftentimes you'll notice the image shift a little bit. And what can happen is straight. Lines like vertical lines near the edge of your frame might have been bent slightly, and they would straighten out when you turn that on. The other thing that I would turn on is under the color tab. There's a check box called Remove Chromatic aberration. If you've ever looked closely at party or image and maybe of a tree branch or you have an iron fence or something, it looks zoom up really close on it. You might see a little purple kind of line around the edge of it on one side and maybe a greenish line on the opposite side. If you ever see that, that's what's known as a chromatic aberration, and it was caused by your lens. This will end up trying, trying to correct for those, and that's a nice thing to do before you state your panorama. Other than that, I'm just gonna optimize the image to make it look good. And so in this case, I don't can't see very much shadow detail, so I might come in here and think about fine tuning things. Then I just have to ask where this picture if you're so beautiful Oh, this is the badlands of South Dakota. That's gorgeous. Yeah, Badlands of South Dakota. We actually were just there. Although this image was not captured on my last visit There it was on the previous one before that. Beautiful. Thanks. Yeah. So anyway, just optimized the images a whole whatever kind of changes you usually make to any kind of picture. The main thing is to make sure the select all button was clicked on before you play with any of the sliders. So any change you make affects the whole thing. When you're done in the lower right, you got your done button. You can click that and you'll see it apply to all the image is an equal amount. Then when I want to stitch my panorama, I select the images just like I have them. Right now. I can go to the tools menu, choose photo shop, and I'm gonna find a choice in there called Photo Merge. And that's what we're gonna use for stitching panoramas. That's tools Photoshopped photo merge. I'm gonna go to a different set of images for that. And Photoshopped, once you choose that is going to come up with this dialog box and all it does is in the middle. It lists the files that you've chosen those air, the file names, and if you happen to notice that one of them shouldn't have been there, you could click on the name and hit the remove button. Or you could hit, browse and go feed it some or images. But there really shouldn't be eating need for that because he selected the images and bridge and you could see the thumbnails of them, so I don't usually screw up on that. So this part here you can usually totally ignore. On the left side, you have different layout choices, and the choice of the top is auto that will analyze your pictures and pick one of these for you. And I usually start off with auto just to see what it does. And then on Lee. If I didn't like the end result, I got might have come back in here a second time, enforce it to use a particular choice, but let's look at what each one of those choices would dio with these particular images. So here's the dialog box. I'm gonna show you one of the time just starting up here working our way down Teoh, see what they would look like. So here's the 1st 1 I think that one might have been perspective, and it's really going to depend on your picture. Don't evaluate this end result. Thinking that every single image you ever shoot is gonna be distorted in this way. It really depends where they're things really close to the camera that it needs to distort to fit together. Or was everything in the shot really far away where didn't need to distort the nearby stuff, to get it to be able Teoh seamlessly match. But in general, for this scene, at least this is the end result with the first choice. If you're wondering, this is Horseshoe Bend, I think in Arizona, right near Page Arizona. Here's the second choice. I don't rember the name of the second choice. It might be cylindrical, but I'd have to go look. But you see, it gives you quite a different look to the image as a whole. Here's the third choice fourth choice, and then the final choice. Now you might think by looking at this one that hey, it's like the least distorted or something of the image because it just fills out the frame in all that. But try not to judge it that quickly. Instead, be critical of it in look throughout the whole image. So if I back up first, look at the just call it the rock that's in the middle and see the general shape of it coming around here on the right edge of it. And then look at the end result over here. Do you see that? It almost looks like it's got a hook like a cantilever coming out over this way. In real life, it doesn't have that. The last choice in that list, if we go look at the list again, is called Reposition in Reposition could only move the images. It can't distort them, bend them or anything to get him to match. It can only move around just like you had prints on a table, and you're just repositioning them, and it really limits what it's capable of doing. So here It wasn't capable of bending one picture to match the others, and it ended up creating that weird distortion that's there. Also, you'll often see repeated elements, and I see some near the lower right near the lower right. Can you see this sort of shadowy area here in just below it? There's another one that's identical, and that's because, again, it couldn't distort the pictures to make them physically match it on. Lee could move them left and right and up and down, and that severely limits what it can dio. So, even though at first glance, this might look like the least distorted version, I think it's the worst start of all. Because unless you're not picky, you know, and you're like, Oh, fine, I can have that cantilever. Maybe the people viewing the image weren't there, so they wouldn't know. But that looks completely wrong, and maybe they wouldn't notice that. If so, I want your clients because that would be able to get jobs done really fast. So anyway, these are the different choices we'd have with this particular image in its personal choice as to which one you like. The boast. And when you choose the choice of auto, it's gonna try to pick one for you, and it usually doesn't okay job. It's just when I don't like the end result that it feeds me that I'll go back and re stitch the panorama and I'll force it into one of these settings because I think it will do a better job. So for me right now, I'm like, in this one because I think I could crop this image without too much difficulty. And it doesn't feel to be all that distorted as faras compared to some of the others. But all we're gonna do is select those images. Choose tools, photo shop, photo merge, and if you'd like, you could use auto. And before you click, okay, and the only other thing we need to do is just double check. This check box down at the bottom has turned on its called blend images together, and it's on by default. But if somebody messes with the, that might turn off on you, but that all that means is make a seamless panorama. Don't make it where I can see the straight edges of where each shot ends. Click OK, and then that's when it's going to start stitching the images. You'll see it in the layers. Pound ends up stacking the images first. Then it ends up trying to align them, and then finally it ends up trying to match the brightness in the color between them. When you're done, you can turn off individual layers. If you'd like to see the various pieces used from each shot, I don't find that to be overly useful. And there's a mask on each one that limits what part of each image is used, but usually right after it's done stitching them. I just merge those layers together to merge them together. You can go to the layer menu, and there's just a choice called Merge visible. Now you might be thinking, What's the difference between merge layers merged, visible and flatten? Image would be a question I'd have any time you see the word flatten, that means merge together the layers that are visible throw away any layers that are hidden and fill any areas that are transparent. Those of the areas that looked like a checkerboard with usually with white in. So I don't want to fill the area that looks like a checkerboard with white right now, and therefore I'm going to avoid flatten image. All right, now merge. Visible emerge layers in this case are going to do the identical thing, but what merge layers would often do is it would just merge the layers you currently have selected. So if you wanted emerge only two layers together, you could select the two and choose merged layers, and it would do that. Anyway, I'm gonna choose merge visible just to simplify this image and get it toward, you know, to a single layer. But the problem now is any to crop the image. So if I go to the crop tool and photo shop, I'm gonna have to pull in these sides in order to get a rectangular and result. And sometimes in the process of doing that, I don't have enough leftover like right at the top where maybe they're getting pretty tight on the sky that's there. When you're cropping the just say no, you can move your mouse outside of the cropping rectangle, and if you click and drag, you can rotate the picture. So if the horizon line isn't quite straight, feel free to just move your mouse a little bit outside of that rectangle and adjusted if needed. Anyway, this is how tight I might need to crop this image plus returner enter when I'm done. It looks like I still have a little bit of checkerboard in the upper left, so I'd have to crop even more insane with just a little hint in the upper right. But I'd like to show you an alternative so you're not having to Crop is tightly as it would usually force you to. So here's a special technique you can use to artificially fill the area that looks like a checkerboard, where photo shop will try to figure out what it thinks should be in that area. And in doing so, we might be ableto just get a little bit of extra versatility when trying to crop the image. In general. When I'm gonna uses a feature that's called content aware fill usually select an area you go to the edit menu. There's a choice called Phil, and in there you have the choice of content aware, content. Aware would look at the surroundings in the dimensions. Say, Hey, what would this area that selected look like based on the surroundings? What does it think would be most appropriate to be there? So in order to do this, I'm gonna select all the areas that look like a checkerboard And to do that, I'm gonna do a little special technique. Here's what we'll dio in the layers panel. I'm gonna move my mouse onto not the name of the layer, but onto the thumbnail image. And I'm gonna hold down the command key if amount of Mac control of him and windows. And when I do that, watch my mouse. Right now it looks like a hand symbol. But when I hold on the command key control on Windows, do you see a little kind of dashed line rectangle that's supposed to look like the marquee tool, the one that makes rectangular selections? It just indicates that when you click, you're gonna get some kind of selection when you command click control clicking and windows. So I'm gonna hold on the command King and clicking that little thumb now Boom! And what it did is it just selected the entire contents of that layer. It's selected everything that didn't look like a checkerboard, so I got this. The shape and the only thing is on the edge of this selection. Sometimes it's what's known as anti alias to anti alias just means it fades out the tiniest bit. Some people called feathering if you do it over a large area. But I want to make this selection one or two pictures smaller just to make sure that I'm not sitting there on a on part of the image that I was only partly showing up because that's what can happen on the very, very edge. So to do that, I'm gonna go the select menu, you know, find a choice called modify, and I'm gonna choose contract about all that means is make my selection larger, but keep it the same shape. It's just like having a balloon full air and used, let a little bit of air out of it, stays the same shape and just get smaller. So I'll choose contract, and I'll just use one. That's fine, so you won't be able to tell it happened. But it just moved my selection in by one pixel on all sides to make it the little last bit smaller, and all that does is make sure that we're not dealing with in a semi transparent pixels that might be on the edge. Here. You see how are one pixel in the edge, then usually the area of selected is the area that it's going to try to fill in, and I don't want it to fill in the middle here. I want the exact opposite of that. So I go to the select menu and I'll choose inverse inverse well, given the opposite. So after choosing Inverse now, I have the checkerboard area selected, and that selection extends one pixel into the image. So that's when I can go to the edit menu and choose Phil and the default setting. A newer versions of photo Shop is content aware. Click OK in. Photoshop will try to figure out what to put their based on the rest of the image. You see what it ended up doing now you got to be critical of it. There will be some repeated elements and other things that you might need to deal with, but it's not bad if you look at it here. I'll hide the edges by typing command H. The very first time you type that on a Macintosh, it says. In general, it's saying the Macintosh operating system usually wants command age to mean hide this application. But historically, Photoshopped meant command age to mean hide selections and things. Which of the two would you like if you choose Hide extras, It acts the way Photoshopped expects it to. It's only gonna ask you that question once on a Macintosh, but let's see what part of the image it ended up filling. If I press the letter Q that turns on quick mask mode, and that will show me the part of the image it did not effect type queue again. It'll turn that off, but you can see that's the part of the image that's really out of the camera and then the rest of the images what it filled in. And I don't think it did all that bad. So now what I would do is grab that crop tool again in I would just visually look at how much of the image. So I think I need to keep, and I'm gonna bring it up in here looking at the right side. There's just not much overly interesting on the right side, so I'm gonna bring it into about there. The left. There's more interesting stuff. We'll bring it to about there, and I see the horizon looks a little bit on the crooked side so I might go outside of the cropping rectangle. Click and just see if I can rotate it a little and then readjust those sides to fine tune press returner. Answer. When I'm done, by the way, with the newer versions of Photo Shop, when you have the cropping rectangle up at the top of your screen, you're gonna have a choice that says, delete cropped pixels. And if that's turned on when you press returner enter, it will throw away the stuff that's outside of the cropping rectangle. If you find that you're not certain about your cropping job and you might want to change it later and in changing it might want to add space back, then turn off that check box, and then it will look like a crop. The image, But the information that it that you're thinking it through away is still out there, and if you grab the crop tool again, you could pull the crop tool out and get it back. Um, so it's up to you. If you want to turn that on, it depends on how certain you are, Um, as to what you got there. So here's my end result now, after doing that, I would be critical of what's going on around the edges because it's where photoshopped filled in information. I'm gonna look for repeated shapes. I'm gonna look for odd transitions or anything else. And if I find any, I'm gonna retouch them. And so I just glanced around the edge here and see if there's anything that looks odd. Nothing's coming to my I immediately. But right here this little dark, shady kind of crack just seems to end abruptly, and I don't know if that should extend through and just a little bit right in the corner. I'm not certain about that type of stuff. If there is something you don't like, you can go to. A tool that is known is that spot healing brush. The spot healing brush looks like a Band Aid with little dotted line behind it, and I could come in here and just paint across an area, and it will redo that part. Try to read, retouch that and give it a couple tries. It'll give you a different result each time so you could touch up some areas or do further retouching. We're gonna talk about retouching or different session, the one right after this. So if you want to get into it there, you can learn more. And so I find that to be overly useful. So I'm not stuck cropping things into what I have left. Instead, I can sometimes cheat, and I find that the content aware fill works amazingly on skies and so skies. No problemas faras. If they're off a little bit, it's where I have real detail, bushes and trees and things that it's usually much easier to see repeated details in other issues. Just remember, you need to make a selection before you go to the edit menu in Choose Phil. And so I should do. You could hold in the command key control on Windows, and you click on the little thumbnail for your layer. And by doing so, it gives you a selection of what's in that layer. Go to select menu, choose inverse. You'll have the opposite of that, and therefore you'll have the area that needs to be filled. I could work all right. Makes sense questions out there. Yes, teacher, I have a question. What's your So the sky's the limit, right? No, it's actually the opposite it. There's no living. There is no limit to the sky. Okay, So filmmaker asked before stitching. Would you correct perspective in light room. You've talked before stitching. Would I correct perspective? Well, the thing is, each one of your images is gonna have the same kind of perspective distortion, and it's gonna It depends on the image. Depends how extreme that perspective distortion is. Sometimes photo shop is great. It just dealing with it and re destroying the images to fit them. If it has an issue, I would go back and correct the perspective distortion. But sometimes in the process of doing so, you're gonna actually limit how it constituents. So I would usually send it through. Just see what it can dio. And if it has an issue with it, then I would end up thinking about correcting ahead of time. Okay, Perfect. And then camera guy wanted to know what's the best buddy deal with parallax errors in panoramic technology wise, I'm trying to make parallax errors. Is that where things don't line up as you're moving around? Yes, yes, The best thing And the one thing I forgot to bring with me in my little special said okay, and I realized it like the moment I got on the plane Kind of thing was, You can have. What's known is a nodal slide. What it would be if I put my tripod back up here and I put my cameras camera up. There is I can let me do this without the fancy head because most people don't have that. If you're wondering about this quick release system where I can change heads and everything, that's the same people that make the tripod. It's really right stuff, Um, but with this with this, what I can do is if I simply do a panorama with a normal set up like this. The place you're rotating around on the camera is back here, and that's not the most ideal spot to rotate around. What happens is if you have any near and far objects in the scene, you have a tree that's close to the camera and then a building that's further away. If you were to look through the viewfinder and line up the tree was something on the house that's behind it. Let's say you line up a tree with the edge of a window or a doorway. If you take your camera and you panic like this, you'll find that those two objects move relative to each other, and it makes it difficult to stitch a panorama because things don't completely lineup is you go around, but with your camera there's a particular point that's special. We're you know how there's a sensor back here and what happens with the light is that light where it hits the sensor before it hits it. It actually kind of crosses comes out the other way. I don't ever seen it where people show that. But if you rotate around a certain part of your lens, then when you rotate around instead of rotating back here near where the sensor is, you rotate somewhere near here, where the actual light is crossing in your lens. When you rotate like this, those two objects the near and far ones, will stay in the same position in your frame, even when you're rotating around and it makes it much easier to stitch a panorama. The main time you need to think about it is when there's near and far objects in what you would dio is you would add to this a little slide that holds your camera so that it's not stuck being attached here. Instead, you could slide it backwards until you find that spot is for us finding the spots. There's a couple things you can dio if you put your camera F 22 Impress the depth of field preview button that'll close down in your lens where you can actually see in there, the lens closing down if you know what I'm talking about. If you look in there, can you see getting smaller in there? Uh, visually, where it looks like that is where it looks like it's closing down is approximately where that cross over point ISS. So you could put enough 22 hit depth of field preview and then visually guest mate, where you saw it in your lens and try to rotate around that that would just be a good starting point pick and near and far object in this scan across it like this, and move the camera before to back further, one direction or the other until when you do that, the near and far objects stay in the same position relative to each other they don't move. And if you do that, then you'll have much better success when shooting panoramas that involve near and far objects. But if all your shooting is a mountain and it's dozens of miles away from you, you're not gonna have to think about that. If you ever have something, though, like a walkway that is coming up towards the camera, your centered on it's like a boardwalk or something, and it's going right around up to your camera lens. You're gonna have big issues when you try to rotate your lens and capture that. And if you end up looking at what's called a nodal slide, you can correct for that. Awesome. You can also get that it really right stuff. There are other companies that have it to. That just happens to be the brand that I use. But at least there you can find information about it and then decide what brand of No, it'll slide. You'd like to use fan testing. Thanks, Ben. All right, let's see what else we can come up with. Sometimes you want to shoot with unusual lenses. Sometimes I just can't get the scene filling my camera frame for instance here is across that I run into when driving, where it is so tall that it's ridiculously tall. I don't even know how many stories tall this is, but it's massive. It's like this. Tall is some skyscrapers, and I wanted to capture a panorama showing the scene. But in order to get the whole thing in, I actually used to fish eye lens because the fisheye lens could go up high enough where it would get the entire thing in the scene and I was able to pan across like that. The problem is with a fish eye lens as you pan across, anything that goes through the center of the frame will end up being nice and straight. But if it ever goes through the edge of the frame, it ends up being bent, and that makes it more difficult to stitch. So if I select these images in order to stitch them into a panorama, what I need to dio is go to the Tools menu, choose photo shop and choose photo emerged just like before. But when I'm in here, there's a couple changes I need to make. First, I need to have it set to auto. I can't tell it to take one of these. If I wanted to do the right job when it comes to a panorama, got to be an auto. Then I usually want to turn on both of the check boxes that air down here at the bottom. The geometric distortion correction is the main one that's going to do the work for me That's gonna try to figure out if I used to fish, eye lens or not. And if I did, it's going to use a special algorithm to stitch these together because it's gonna know how they're being distorted by the fisheye. So what did I dio? I just turned on auto, and I also turned on two additional check boxes at the bottom. Uh, then if you were to stitch these images and we might not wait for that one because I haven't end result here, it's gonna be able to stitch them together. And so it'll depend. This one might have been stitched with an older version of photo shop, so if the other one finishes, we might get a slightly different end results. But as long as it has the metadata on the image where your camera actually attaches things like the exposure in the lens choice that's used. It will be able to figure out that it's a fisheye lens, and it will use a special algorithm to stitch it. So even those fish eyes you can get stitched. It's actually pretty crazy because the lens does amazing amount of distortion. Now here's the end result here. Then there are a bunch of other things weaken Dio. I'm gonna take this image and merch layers together. I usually just type command e to do that control e and windows. But if you hate keyboard shortcuts under the layer a minion you'll see command, he means merge layers. And when you're done with the panorama, all the layers are automatically selected, so just command the would do it for you. Now notice on this image that the horizon that's there is bent, so it didn't completely fix this. Also with the cross, the horizontal portion of the cross also is bowed a little bit, so we do have a few choices that will sometimes work to try to fix this. Other times it will be outside of its ability, but we want to do is first merged layers together, and after that, if we want to do some further correction, you can go to the filter menu. And there's a choice in here called adaptive wide angle and with adaptive wide angle. We get our little preview in here, and what we can do is click on the horizon in drag. And as I dragged, you see this line that it's making. Can you tell that that line is bending just like the horizon? ISS. I'm only gonna be able to drag it a certain distance before it starts to deviate from where the horizon is. I'm just gonna kind of trace the horizon as I move over in. Whenever it's no longer matches up, I'll stop going over further. So you see, right now it's no longer matching the horizon, so I'll probably stop right in the middle. Now, with this, I can hold down the shift key on my keyboard, and if I hold down shift before I let go of the mouse button, the shift key tells it, make this line straight. So when I let go, let's see what happens. You see that right side just got all straight I could go then to the left side, and I'm gonna guesstimate where the edge of the horizon would be over here. I could get and see it on the edge of the frame there. Click. And then again, I'll kind of trace that horizon line. I don't have to trace it. I could be up here and stuff. It's just I can only tell when it deviates from matching the curvature by staying on a line that would be straight. And I might see if I can give something like that. I'll hold shift again. I mean, make this straight. Now let go. And now you see how it kind of tried to fix that, which is kind of nice, and that I knew the same thing for the vertical, um, across. I don't know if it's perfectly straight or not, but I'll come over here and try to get centered on the middle of it. There's a zoomed up version on the right side of my frame that makes it easier to tell if you're really on that edge or not, and so I'll get it so it lines up there. Then I'll drag up to the top and again I'll look at that preview on the right side. That gives me a zoomed up version so I can see how close I am. If I need that to be straight all shift and then it will trying to straighten that out. You might need to do this to a bunch of different areas in your picture, depending on how much distortion there is. So I see the horizontal portion of the cross eyes still looking rather bent. So I'm gonna try to get right out there on the edge of it. Try again here to the middle. And if I want that to be straight ahold shift. If I don't hold strip shift, it will make it a straight line. But you're straight line won't be perfectly horizontal are perfectly vertical. So shift means horizontal or vertical. And then I'll try the opposite side. Hold shift. Okay, now, it's not perfect, cause I noticed that the T the horizontal on the cross one side looks longer than the other. But that might have been that my camera wasn't perfectly centered on it when I went around and it had some distortion. Soas faras. When you don't hold shift. That's for things like these lines down here. If these lines look bent, you would click on the end of one of them, dragged to the opposite end and without holding shift, you just let go. And that means straight in this line doesn't mean make it vertical or horizontal. It just means make a straight. And so I could come in here an attempt to do these as well. I'd usually be just a little bit more careful that I'm being now. I'm just doing it kind of trying to get it done quick. But when you're done, you can click the OK button and you're gonna get your end result. And I believe you can also do this on a smart object. So if you want Teoh, go up to the filter menu and say, convert for smart filters before you go into that, that would make it so you can make further changes later. Eso could be a little bit more versatile. I just didn't think of that, didn't want to distract you by showing you another feature at the same time, but that was funded of the filter menu. It's called adaptive wide angle. It is pretty cool for panoramas. I wouldn't just use it, though, for fisheye shots. Use it for any panorama you've shot. So if when I shot that one of Horseshoe Bend if the very top horizon just didn't quite look straight, it looked like it was Boeing a bit going to the exact same filter through all my line across the horizon and see when does it start deviating from it? And thats like the limit for how long I go. And then I do a separate line for the other side if needed. Sometimes you can do the entire horizon in a single, uh, shot. Okay, All right, let's talk about different kind of shooting Sometimes. I don't want a plain old panorama because I got a plain old C seen and it's kind of boring. I need to spice it up a bit. I need to do something to make you know it's an industrial building, and it's gonna look boring. So I just need something that makes it look different. And so let's take a look at some examples of what it might be able to accomplish These air. What I call panel Lodges panel Lodge is a combination of the word panorama in the word collage. I coined that term. So that's why we get the TM on the trademark. But what you do is instead of grabbing a wide angle lens where you could capture, let's say the whole scene in one shot, you grab a telephoto lens so you can only get a small portion of the scene because it zoomed up so much that you can't fill the whole frame. And then you capture a Siris of images where you just capture a small portion of the scene and then you rotate the camera a bit and move over a bit and capture another one. Rotate the camera a different angle, move over a bit and capture another one. Rotated mawr. Move over more, and you just need to make sure that each shot overlaps the previous one quite a bit. So give me an idea how I might capture something. Now, if we capture something like that, then if I tell Photoshopped a stitch it together in a special way, and I'll show you how to do that in a moment, we can end up with something that might look like this for a one shot. I don't know if that was the same one there, though, or here's the one for the Moscow one where you saw the grid of the individual images or weird looking ones like this. You can have it distorted if you zoom the lens of your camera or you walk around as you're capturing it so you don't capture all the images from one spot. Instead, you walk three feet to your right and you take another shot. Maybe take five or six shots there and the walk three more feet to your right takes a more shots. Photo shop won't be ableto stitch that together in or normal shot because of perspective is different in each. And so it's gonna have to do really weird distortion. This one is a very odd one in that I did to individual panel lodges from two different angles and then didn't realize I had them all selected, meaning I was trying to take two different pictures, one from let's Say, the front of an object and one from the side of the object, and I just didn't realize, because they're all these random shots that I had selected the shots for both and it put, um, altogether anyway because it realized the things that stuff in the background didn't vary that much because it's many miles away. Eso if you can see this, but this is what's called Teapot Junction right here, and there's another one of the exact same object right here. It's kind of weird. Yeah, that was completely unexpected. Other ones. That's the one I think you saw the original Siris of. So anyway, let's look at How the heck do you do that? I've mentioned how you capture it. You just zoom up, capture small portions, rotating your camera and just make sure that one shot overlaps the next by a good amount. Then you're going to select the images that you captured and go to the tools menu. Choose photo shop and she's photo merge, just like we did before. And then there's at least one thing you're gonna want to do, and that is Turn off the check box called Blend images together, because that's what creates a seamless panorama where it looks like just one image. But if you turn that off, then you're going to still be able to see the distinct edge where one photo ended and the next one began. After turning that off, then you can choose which one of these choices to use for how it's been blended together with one that was of the shot in Moscow. I think that was really distorted, I think there I used to choice called cylindrical, although that was stitched with an older version of photo shop. They've improved this sense, which makes it less artistically fun and a little more accurate. But if you have an older version of photo shop and you've used this setting, it will be more pronounced. And if you want it to look as if it's just a pilot prints that have been moved and rotated, then you want to use a setting that's called Kalash. Collage means all. I could do a scale and rotate it cannot distort them. So I'm gonna use the setting called Collage, and I turned off blend images together. Ah, click OK, and it's gonna do its work now. One thing I've discovered is you're going to get the best result. Usually if the very first shot you take is straight because otherwise it let's say the very first shot is upside down. Well, then it's gonna rotate every single other shot to match that, and it just might be quite a bit of rotation to deal with it. If the very first shot establishes what is straight, then when it moves the other ones, you end up with a result that looks more normal to begin with and takes just a little bit less processing time but don't stress about it. So here's our end result. You can see the individual layers in my layers panel, and the only problem with this is that people will think it's just in effect. You applied in Photoshopped, meaning they'll think it was one photo and you just applied some puzzle looking effect or something. So what I often try to do is try to make it more obvious that these air separate shots. You can help that out a little bit in camera. In your camera, you can turn on auto bracketing auto bracketing, usually various the exposure so you goes progressively brighter. Let's say as you take more, uh, a couple shots if you tell it to auto bracket by 1/3 or 1/2 of a stop, then each one of these images would be different in brightness, and that would give it something to make him. So they stand out from each other. They look different, but that's not essential. I didn't do it here. But the other thing we can do here is we can add things like a drop shadow. Or I can make this look as if it was printed each individual photo, and we left a little white border around it. So let's try that out with the top layer active. I'm gonna go to the bottom of my layers panel. I'm gonna click in the letters FX, and I'm gonna find a choice called Where Is It? Drop Shadow. And while this dialogue boxes open, which gives me the settings for the drop shadow, I could move it off to the side. And if I click on my picture, I could move my drop shadow. All it's doing when I drag on the image is it's changing to settings. There's a setting called angle and then, in a setting called Distance. Did you see them changing as I drag? All it's doing is figuring out what direction did I drag and by how far and it types in the direction and how far to control how soft the shadow is. You need to adjust the size, setting in the control hard, brighter, dark. It is you just the opacity. So it's a little too dark. You can lower the opacity, so that's going to give us some separation. Visually, right now, it's only been applied to the top layer. I'll show you how to get it on the other layers in a minute, but the other thing I want to do is have a white border around the edge. So to do that on the list on the left, you're gonna find a choice called stroke right here. And that would add a border around the edge. When you add the stroke, don't click on the name stroke. I'm sorry. Don't click with them. I said that Wrong. Don't click on the check box if you click on the check box. It allowed a stroke, but it won't show you the settings related to the stroke. Instead of clicking on the track box, click on the name that will do two things. It will turn on that setting called Stroke and it will change over to show you the settings over here. There, you're gonna have a size setting. We decide how big of an entry want, but with default sightings, when you just bring up the size, you'll notice the corners are rounded. In order to avoid the rounded look, you're gonna need a change of setting in here setting called position default settings outside said it to inside and now watch the corners. You see how they became nice and sharp. So then I'll adjust this to get the size that I like for my border and to change the color. There's just a little rectangle down here you click on, and if you click once on, it brings up color picker, and I usually choose a color just the tiniest bit darker than white. The reason I choose darker than white is if I print this entire image on an inkjet printer, it's gonna be on a white sheet of paper. And so the area that's out here that looks like a checkerboard is going to be the white sheet of paper. And if my border that's right up against that is also white, the to blend together seamlessly just disappear. But if I make this the tiniest bit darker than white, you'll be able to see the difference between the border out here in the empty sheet of paper that it's printed on, so just the tiniest bit darker than white. Then to get this, which is currently on one layer to get it on all the other layers, here's what I can dio. If I go to the layer menu, there's a choice that's called later style, and within that menu is a choice called copy layer style that's gonna copy whichever settings are applied to this particular layer. So it's gonna copy the stroke, and it's gonna copy that drop shadow setting. Then I need to select altogether layers to tell it which layers to put it on. If I go to the select menu, there is a choice of all layers that would grab all my layers, and I just go right back to the layer menu and go back to the same side menu. It was called layer style, and this time, instead of telling it to copy the layer style, I'm going to tell it to paste it and therefore it will apply it to all the layers that are currently selected. Boom, Here we go. And so you're not limited to drop shadows and borders. You can do all sorts of things. Sometimes I do something known as an inner glow, which would add a slight brighten or darken in effect all the way around the edge of the picture. That's also could give you some better separation. Ah, and just other things I'll experiment with. So if you look at some of these examples, this one just has the white border and drop shadow. This one just has the drop shadow. This one has nothing, so they don't separate very well again. Drop shadow. But this one also has a little inner glow. If you look at some of the edges of the photographs, you will see it's just a little bit darker around the edge. And so that's trying to separate us. Well, so it's up to you what kind of style you'd like, But I call that effective panel lage in the key. The making that so Photoshopped, constituent and maintain that look is when you're in the photo merge dialog box. Just make sure the blend images together. I think it was the name of it. Check boxes turned off than it can handle that. Any questions or comments about the weird looking panel? Lage Good question. He's just a suggestion. What would you suggest? A sense it panorama, since every minute delight. This is a dramatic change in the light. Eso you're talking about independent of this technique. Just panorama in general. Well, usually the problem with the panorama when the light is changing quickly is by the time you get to the opposite end of the panorama, the light could be different. And so that's usually when I would not do a vertical, I would do a horizontal. Instead, there's gonna be fewer shots to make it across. I might also zoom out a little bit so that I'm covering a larger area in my viewfinder unless you need to print the thing absolutely huge. But I would zoom out a little bit just so I can have fewer images total in my panorama, and I would test it right where the sun is to get the exposure right? And then you just be really good about being quick going across there. We're capturing it, But sometimes you end up compromising the quality just to say I need to, because the light's gonna change so quickly. So you end up zooming out a considerable amount, and you're just gonna end up cropping a bit out later. Eso you could do fewer images across that panorama. Other things we could talk about as far as getting the highest quality from your panorama. A tripod. Obviously, it's gonna help you quite a bit. Do. It's something stable if you're not going to use a tripod instead, are you gonna do handheld? What I end up doing is you know, the focus points you can see in your viewfinder, where you can see little rectangles that it might use to focus on. Just line one of those up with the horizon and then make sure as you go across your panorama that that focus point that's in your viewfinder still lines up with the panorama before you hit the button on each shot. Therefore, you know you're not going downhill or uphill when you're shooting. If you're shooting on a tripod and you want the absolute sharpest end result, what I would end up doing is I would turn on live view mode, which on my cameras, just a button sitting right here. And when I turned on, I can see in the viewfinder back here. What that does is that takes the mirror that's in your camera in flips it out of the way because it needs to be out of the way for the sensor toe work to pick up this image because that mere flopping up and down can cost some vibration. And if it happens while you're capturing, your image is going to soften the image a little bit. The other thing that I would do is I would change my drive setting on here to to second self timer. If you haven't set to two seconds self timer, then you hit the button and it takes two seconds before takes the picture, and that means any movement from your hand touching the camera is gonna be cancelled out. It's not going toe. Pick up that motion so two seconds self timer and live view mode is going to give you a much sharper image than just sitting there on a tripod and manually hitting the button. It's doing a bracket right now, because I didn't look at the setting say I had, then the final thing that I do, if I'm being really careful of my panorama is instead of using auto focus on my camera lens, I end up when I'm in live view mode, zooming up to 10 X view, meaning 10 times magnification. There's just a little magnifying magnifying glass icon on the back, and if I hit it twice, it magnifies the image by 10 times. And then I can use a little directional wheel on the back to move around to look at different Parsons of my scene, and I can manually focus, and I find I can get my focus right on exactly where I I need it. By doing all those things combined, I can end up with a dramatically sharper image compared to other people there shooting hand held or just shooting on tripod. So live view mode to second self timer could be really nice. And then, if you really want to do it, you can dio manual focus with the 10 times Zoom on this so a few other things to consider. Another thing to consider is when you're stitching a panorama the amount of data that's in your file can affect the quality of your end result. See if I can show you this by chance. Take me a minute. If you capture your image and raw file format, it can end up capturing mawr information, and your end result in your stitching can look better. And I want to show you a setting involved in visually what kind of difference you might be able to expect. So right now, this is, Ah, Panorama that I shot when I was in an area called Morro Bay in California. In, if you ever hear that there's a fire around somewhere, go out to shoot sunrise or sunset because what will happen is the sun usually is only all orange when it's right on the horizon, and usually it gets above the horizon. As it gets higher and higher, it becomes less and less orange, and it looks more like the normal son. But if there's ever a fire in the area, the smoke from the fire is gonna block your view of the sun, and it's gonna make it so it stays like a nice orange ball, even as it gets higher and higher in the sky. So sunrise and sunset time when there's a fire somewhere in the area could be really interesting. And that's what I have here is usually the sun wouldn't be anywhere near this orange around the the landscape when it was that high above the horizon. But when I captured this, let's see, over here on the right side, I'm going to adjust this image to try to exaggerate with what's there. I can see an issue on my screen. I don't know if you can see it here. I can see it a little bit there, but I'm going to exaggerate it, and then I'll show you how to prevent it from happening. Take me just a moment, okay? Can you see some banding where it looks like it's got stair stepping or people call it banning? I can see a line right here. I can see another line right there. Now the line right there. I don't know how well that's gonna show up on the feed because the feed gets compressed and everything, and it's sometimes harder to see. I can see that exaggerated even further, but if you can see vertical lines in here have slightly different shapes that's banding. And that happens when you don't have enough information in the file to give you a smooth transition from one shade doing next and let me show you a different version of this and see if it looks better. Do you see this version of the same file? It looks noisy because we're brightening up a really dark area. That's where the noise would usually be, but I don't see the banding. The only difference between these two images is the image with the banding is what's known as eight bits. The image without the banning is notice 16 bits and let me show you where that's controlled and therefore how, if you ever see that happening, you might be able to avoid it. Only problem is, I'll have to find a raw file, and I don't have one overly handy. You know, Preed, position. I will hear some raw files. Good. So if you open a raw file by double clicking on, it usually opens in camera, raw in and camera at the bottom. There's a line of text right down here. If in that tax, do you see it saying eight bit. That means that if you stitch a panorama that has a sky that extends across really wide area, you might see some banding it. It doesn't mean they're always going to see it, so you might just want to stitch the panorama and then inspect the sky to see if you have it. But if for some reason you do end up with banding in your image after doing that, go back to those original images. And if the raw files open one of them in camera and just click that line of text at the bottom when you click it, this will come up and near the upper right. You have the choice between eight and 16 bit. If you set it to 16 bit, your resulting file size is gonna be much higher for the panorama that you end up getting. But when you click OK, it will remember that setting from now on. So all your images from now on will be what's known a 16 bit. And if you stitch those images into a panorama, you shouldn't get the banding. The difference is eight bits means 256 brightness levels and that's it. 16 bit means thousands of thousands and thousands of thousands of brightness levels, many more than you'd have in a bid file, and it allows you to get a smoother looking and result. You're not always gonna notice it, though, so I don't always have that set to eight bit. Instead, I just stitched my panoramas together, and if I ever notice it being having banding, then I go change that setting, and I'll re stitch a panorama to have a stitch it with more data. When it's done being stitched, you're welcome to convert it to eight bit to get the file size back down. So let me see if I can show you that this is, ah, 16 bit image. This is the one that doesn't have the banding, and I just afterwards would choose image mode. Eight bit that your file size to go down, but it's not usually gonna introduce the banding back in. It's just it needs the extra data at the moment. It's stitching it, get it to look smooth when you're done most of the time you can convert it to eight bit. Your file size will go down. You could save the image and you'll be fine and you'll avoid the banding. So keep that in mind now. Sometimes I open an image after stitching it, and I'll end up with some issues most of time. It has to do a skies. If I ever stitch of panorama in the sky isn't even when I'm done, it usually has to do with the sun being position in a particular area, making that Ariel brighter than the opposite end of the panorama. Something like that. But sometimes I want to even it out a bit in this particular case to you. Notice that the upper right corner of the image is a bit darker than the upper left corner in the orange ish kind of color that's on the near The horizon Line is quite different on the right side compared to the left. Well, if for some reason you wanted to get closer to matching, here's a technique you could use. This involves using curves, which is federal shops. Most powerful adjustment. I had a class part of my Photoshopped mastery class, Siri's, I think, where I covered curves and depth here. We're just gonna cover just enough to get this part done, but what you end up doing is you click in your Layers panel on the half black and half white circle. It's found at the bottom, and that creates an adjustment layer. We want to choose an adjustment that's called curves. Then you'll find a hand icon that's in there, and you need to click on the hand icon. That means if I click on my picture, do something related to curbs instead of using whatever tool used to be active in my tool panel, then I need to click on my image in the area that I want to change. But when I click on the image in the area, want to change? I need to hold down to special keys on my keyboard. The special keys I'm gonna hold down on a Mac would be shift in command on windows That would be shifting control. And right now this is in the way because I can't see the upper right corner of my picture to get this out of the way. I just click on the icon that's over here that toggles the visibility of this thing. So this and get it out of the way. I'll click there. So I'm gonna move my mouse up here to where I want to change the image and I'm gonna hold down the two keys that I mentioned. Shift in command. I know. Click. What it just did is it measured how much light was in that area, and it didn't do anything on the main curve. It instead did things on the curves for red, green and blue. There should be a dot on the red curve that indicates how much red was in that area. And in this case, the amount of red is all all the way up here in the corner that you go to green and there should be a dot on the green curve on a big see it or not. But it's right there that just indicates how much green light was in that area. Go to blue, and there's a dot on the blue curve to indicate how much blue light was in that area. What's cool, though, is if I expand this dialog box by grabbing the bottom edge and just pulling on it, there's the numbers you could deal with, and that tells you how much blue in this case that we're looking at The Blue Curve was in that portion of the image where I clicked. So you see, the number 44 doesn't mean anything to me. It just means there's 44 blue in that corner. Well, what I want to do is find out how much blue is in the opposite corner. So I'm just gonna move my mouse to the opposite corner and just move it into the picture. When I do that looking curves do you see the number changing? And that indicates how much blue is underneath my mouse right now. So if I look, I see the number 102 So all I'm going to do is come over here and type in that number for output. So what happens is input means what do we start with? Output means, What are we gonna end up with? So input is how much was in the upper right corner of the picture. And I just typed in for output the amount that was on the other side of the picture. I'm gonna switch over here to green and do the same thing. This number represents how much was in the area I clicked on, which is the upper right of the picture. 21. I'm gonna move my mouse temporarily over here to the left side. Do you see the number 51 showing up? I'm just gonna type that in here for output. So we tell it to have that amount on the other side of the picture. And I don't think we need to change red. If I remember right there about the same, both sides will find out. Yeah, it's It's zero or 2 55 It means it's have the absolute limit. So we don't really need a change Red. Now, The problem is, it made this change to the entire picture and we needed toe only affect the upper right corner. But for now, if I turn off this adjustment layer, look at the upper right corner. Here's the original. Here's mine results seem much brighter. It iss in different shade of blue. Look at that shade of blue and compare it to the opposite side of the document. When I have the adjustment hidden, it should look very similar. We look at the left side of the document right now and then in a second look at the right side, they should look similar. The only thing is, we don't need this adjustment to affect the rest of the image. So all we need to do is grab my paintbrush tool and I'm gonna paint with black. If I use a soft edged brush and I paint with black, what happens is when adjustment layer is active. Paying with black is going to remove the adjustment. The actual black paint will go into this thing. That's a mask and black and a mask means don't show up. So if I click here, it's going to remove the adjustment from this area. And so I'm just gonna paint across the areas where I don't think it needed the adjustment. Kind of like that. And let's hide that again before after see what's doing to the corner. I think I might need a high, just a little bit more of it in here, but maybe not hide all of it. So what I could do is lower the opacity of my brush. I'm just gonna bring the capacity down to maybe, I don't know, 35 40%. That means removed 30 or 40% of the adjustment, and I'll paint through there trying to even that out a little bit. Get the transition to be somewhat appropriate. But take a look at what it's doing. See how we're getting close so I could simply do more than one of these adjustments. I could do another one for the orange ish that's near the horizon here to get it to match the orange on the opposite side and then just paint with black to say, Don't affect all this rest of the image and I can get it to even out. If the adjustment that I apply is just a little bit too much, sometimes it is. What I'll end up doing is when that adjustment layers active. I'll go to the top of my layers panel, and there's an opacity control. I'll just click right on the word opacity and drag to adjust it. And so as I lower this, it lessens the effect of the adjustment. So I'll just click on opacity, drag it till, goes to zero and slowly bring it up. As I look at the image, decide how much of that I think would be useful in this image. It will be somewhere in there, huh? So there's all sorts of things you can do with stitching panoramas. We got any questions about anything we covered. A handful of people were wondering about the problems of hand holding. And you know that a lot of a lot of photographers out there doing that, they're not walking around with their We know what their tripods and the advice you could give to them. Hand holding. Yeah. First thing is your arm position. Instead of being like one handed up like this, get your elbows into your body, your hand under the lens here so you can support it and get your camera really pushed up against your head so that you have enough support points that make it stable or, if you're comfortable with it, try this out. Put your camera on your left shoulder and you can put your hand underneath it to stabilize it if you need and then shoot with your left eye. If you do that, you got your entire shoulder supporting the camera and therefore you can shoot around your panorama and it's not know gonna move anywhere near as much. Compared to the people that are doing this where they have this isn't supporting them next to it all. You can do it there or get those elbows into your body and camera really uptight. And that can help with that. Or if you try some cameras, conduce it where it actually shoots video of what you're doing. So instead of having to take individual frames, you just pan across the scene. It will do the stitching right in the camera, which could be convenient. My IPhone could do that, but some other phone, some other cameras can Ah, and then other than that, I end up using the focus spots inside my viewfinder, and I just remember how far away from from the horizon is it with each shot, and I try to keep it consistent.