Skip to main content

Composite Panorama

Lesson 2 from: Getting Started with Composite Images

Tim Grey

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2200+ more >

Lesson Info

2. Composite Panorama

Lesson Info

Composite Panorama

Owing to switch over to bridge for this one because I'm going to let photoshopped do all the work for me for this next example, I'm going to create a composite panorama, so I've got multiple images you can see here and you can tell by looking at them as I pan through these individual photos that I was standing in one position and I was panning across the scene so amusing emanuel exposure here, making sure I'm using the exact same exposure settings from framed the crane overlapping each frame by about twenty percent or so. So when I take my first image, I'll look over toward the right hand side about twenty percent in from the edge. I'll use that as the left edge when I moved to the next frame into the next frame and to the next frame and now I have this sequence of images that kind of form a panorama obviously well kind of form if I assembled them into a composite image so let's take a look at that process all go ahead and start by clicking on the first image in the sequence and then h...

old the shift key and click on the last image in the sequence in order to select all of those images in between, so click on the first hold the shift key click on the last and all of those images in between will also be selected I could start from photo shop and initiate this photo merge process from photoshopped, browse and find the images I just find it is much, much easier to navigate to a particular location, filter my images, et cetera, locate the specific images I want enbridge and then assemble them in photo shop and you could certainly do the exact same thing in light room if you're using light room to manage your photos. So with those images selected, I'll go to the tools menu and choose photoshopped, followed by photo merge so the photo shop was not already running. It would be launched for me automatically in this case it was running, and so it'll just start automatically will just come to the forefront automatically, and the photo emerged dialogue will appear there's a few options here, not too many. I can choose the layout, the type of panorama that I was creating. So was that a perspective panorama? Was it a cylindrical panorama, a spherical panorama, a collage panorama? What I don't even know what that's? Not sure I know what these are, but I don't need to worry about it. Because photoshopped actually does a really good job of figuring it out automatically. In my case, it was a perspective panorama because I was rotating my physical orientation relative to the scene, I could also use cylindrical sort of you're moving around the subject, so you've got a building on a corner and you kind of moving around from one side to the next and assembling those and the reason that it wants to know this is so that it could apply perspective corrections to make the image look accurate. But I find in the vast majority of cases, thie auto option works absolutely great, so take advantage of that. You'll notice that the source files have automatically been set for me to the specific images that I've already selected in adobe bridge. In other words, I've used bridge to send these images over to photo shop specifically to the photo merge feature in photo shop, and then we have a few check boxes to consider so blend images together. This is the whole reason we're here really is to blend the photos together, and so I absolutely want that option turned on there's some exceptions where you might want to use a more creative approach, for example, you want to do some variation on a theme with a panorama, but usually before creating a panorama. The whole point is to have the images blended together for us. We'll see the result of that momentarily so as a general rule, yes, absolutely leave that option turned on vignette removal. If you're using a wide angle lens for your panoramas, stop and use a longer lens. Generally speaking, I recommend using a focal length of a least one hundred millimeters to minimize distortion between the individual frames in your panorama, then getting typically occurs primarily with wider angle lenses. So I've been getting is an issue, then you might reconsider how you're doing. Your panorama is in the first place, obviously there's exceptions or situations where you can't back up far enough away from the subject to use a longer lens, or at least not safely, the grand and in comes to mind, for example. But if you do have been getting in the individual frames, then you can turn on the vignette removal check box in this case, it's not an issue, so I'll leave that turned off, and then geometric distortion correction. In theory, we might always want this turned on in actual practice, you could define rules, theoretically, for when the effect is actually going to be helpful versus hurtful, but in reality, it's, hard to predict, but you would think with a wide angle lens, I definitely want that geometric distortion correction but actually sometimes it's good sometimes it's bad when it does apply you're likely going to need to severely crop the image and that could be more problematic than the distortion in the first place so if you think distortion is an issue if you think that you've got kind of a way warped result or that you might end up with a warped result I would try assembling your panorama twice once when it turned on once with it turned off I generally leave it turned off just depends on the circumstances but more often than not leave that turned off that was so easy basically I just left the defaults exactly as they were I just wanted to talk to you about them just a little bit so really all I need to do is click the ok button and photo shop will get toe work and so what will happen is each of those images is being opened and being first assembled into a composite sort our own we're looking at the squirrel with the sky we had two images how many images airway assembling now one two three four five we're assembling exactly six images in fact it's already finished but photo shop is taking all of those images and stacking them together making a layer document except in the process it's not just stacking them it's actually lining them up so I overlap those photos will where exactly is that overlap where do I need to position the images so that they overlap perfectly so that when I blend them together I get a good result and do I need to manipulate the shape of that photo distort the shape of that photo to make things line up a little bit better especially for using a wide angle lens for example I'll do that so you might notice here I'll zoom in just a little bit and you'll notice is that I have these kind of you know, bulging tops to the photos it's sort of bends from one photo to the next that's that distortion so instead of having a rectangular image they've been bowed out just a little bit in order to get things to a line that would have been even more extreme had I turned on that check box to correct for the geometric distortion but perhaps most importantly what you might notice zoom in and just kind of pan across the photo do you notice where the images blend together? Where did one image and the next image begin? I cannot see any evidence whatsoever that the images were blended together it looks like a perfect blend how on earth did photoshopped do that? Well, we're using layer masks so I'll just turn off one of my random images in the middle of this panorama and we can see how photoshopped went about blending those photos photos toggle that often on and you can see that it not only aligned the images but then used a layer mask to cut away various areas of the photos so that they would all blend together seamlessly. Now, if you're interested in creating composite images and you're intimidated by the concepts related to composite images, just make all of your composites panoramas and that photo shop do all of the work for you because this is literally a composite image an image comprised of multiple layers for our purposes today were primarily going to focus our attention on creating composite images where we're literally stacking images in the same position and just blending them together in various ways here were assembling images in sequence essentially same concepts just different orientation for the photos. The only other step I would need to perform here, of course, would be the crop the photo you can see that I have some transparency up toward the edges, and so I'll just choose the crop tool with the letter c and just drag each of the corners and basically what I want to make sure that I'm doing is adjusting the crop box so that all four corners of that crop bucks fall inside the actual image area. Obviously I could make some aesthetic decisions about the cropping as well, but I absolutely want to make sure that all four corners and all of the edges so I would even pan across the edges here and make sure that the crop box falls inside the actual image area all the way around. It looks like that is the case. I'm going to turn off the delete crop pixels check box, make sure that's turned off so that my crop is actually known destructive. I'm just hiding the pixels outside of that crop box, not obliterating them, not believing the middle. So then I will just click the apply button, and that will apply my crop. And now I have my finished panorama, which I could obviously save, and if I save this, I would say that as a tiff or a psd image that's the same for all of my composite images, because doing that by default causes all of the layers that are part of that image to be saved as part of the finished files. So I've got in this case six images all stacked together to make one big panorama with layer masks, et cetera. If I say this is a tipper psd, close it tomorrow, I come back to it again, open it up, maybe I find there's a little bit of a mistake or I want to refine my crop, maybe the layer mask wasn't quite perfect, I can clean all those issues up, no problem at all, maximum flexibility, just amazing

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Tim Grey - Getting Started with Composite Images - Reference Guide.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

alexbreugelmans
 

This is a beginners course, with some very handy tips for advanced users also. I am considering myself an intermediate one :), but enjoyed this course a lot! Tim's style is very relaxing, entertaining, and you can learn a lot! I want to see more of this teacher, in advanced setting. Worthwhile buying this course!!!!!

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES