Skip to main content

Stitching Images Together in Photoshop

Lesson 20 from: Taking Flight: Drone Photography & Video

Jeff Foster

Stitching Images Together in Photoshop

Lesson 20 from: Taking Flight: Drone Photography & Video

Jeff Foster

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2200+ more >

Lesson Info

20. Stitching Images Together in Photoshop

Lesson Info

Stitching Images Together in Photoshop

All of our images are imported I'm going to select all of my images they have the they have the lens correction applied to them we're going to go over here to our edit auto align layers they're all selected um the secret answer to this one is spherical when I'm pointed at the horizon for all of my photographs and emerging together for panorama the secret solution is spherical there's something about this combination of pointing at the horizon and then using spherical to bring them all together he's crossing his fingers that this will work you know you do a demo how many times you had copters crashing and failing yesterday what do you think my chances are that this is going to actually work okay dad no crashes the answer the questions why didn't russ target his images and just select photo merge? None of you asked me that photo merge will take you through the whole process. It will ask you how you want to stitch these together you say spherical but it will then go do the whole process o...

f merging them together, blending them together um and finishing it off in one step that you can't undo I prefer just something about me the command z or control z I like to experiment in this process so I want to know that I can go back one step so I tend to do this as steps rather than the automated process how are you can use the automated process but I find sometimes believe it or not there can be glitches in photoshopped things go wrong I know it's never happened is sometimes sometimes it happens and I just want to be able to go back one step um next step looks a little bizarre don't worry there's a little bit of rolling distortion happening here but we're going to go into auto blend layers and blend those all together as a panorama seamless tones check this out remember those blades in our shot across those his fingers blade's gone so the combination of the removing the lens with the lens correction then with the blending of the images it looks that the images and it says on average, is there a blade in the sky? And it says on average no because it looks at all of my ten images and it it analyzes them and says on average it's mostly clouds I'm going to throw the blades out so it's a pretty it's a nice feature that we designed in no, it happens just happened to come along for the ride really nicely with getting rid of blades out of images, which is pretty cool let's do merge layers don't flatten the image I still like this flexible nature of the background um I said I loved adobe camera raw um I also love smart objects and try and influence you to consider smart objects in your everyday projects would you great because I know this side of the room uses smart objects side doesn't uh yeah um smart object what does a smart object? So we're going to encase this inside of a smart object we're taking our entire panorama putting it inside of a smart object so that we can distort, manipulate and alter it, warp it and still have the original information inside that smart object and that's the basics to it it's this shell that sits on the outside and here's some of things you can do to the shell first we can do is adaptive wide angle and this is cool and let's see if this is going to be good for us ah ha ha ha! Look at this. I want you to look up your camera model hero three black edition gopro. Where did you get that information? That information was what we applied with the lens profile back in adobe camera raw and it's embedded inside of these. So now this portion of this step the adaptive wide angle knows what it's looking at and knows that it's a panorama and going to project the results imagine this three d shape that it's projecting it on and we can look at some of the other shapes here's, fisheye and you don't always have to accept the default but let's look at the projection of fish eye perspective panorama find which one looks closest teo the results that you want and use that as a starting point but I like panorama because panorama knows that lens distortion for this image I'm gonna scale this down a little bit so we can see this there we go so it knows the lens knows that's the distortion and watch as I draw a line here using the tool in the upper left hand corner that constraint tool watch how the constraint tool bends and curves to the structure of the image so it's looking at the the distortion which has been applied to it notice it turns red if we're going outside the boundary he's also notice I've placed my cursor in the middle you think that I could try and straighten the horizon by clicking on the left and moving to the right? But if you try and stretch this line too far it's exceeding the amount of data that it can process so a blue line means I can process that the red line means it cannot so I typically we'll start in the middle and then moved to the edge and I find this point where it's not our king down it's not our king up I confined the horizon by looking at that line I hold down the shift key and it constrains the horizon did you see that do that again because we didn't see that okay I heard that uh yeah so watch the line no no wait for it yes shift key horizon click again notice the blow up here on the right goto jeff no no okay um and then shift key so I split this into two pieces to zero in and start to straighten up my horizon it's a pretty cool technique you could use warps you could use um liquefy or um public warp but this one really is nice because it's global and so and so quick but wait there's more now that we've set up that as a solid line um I want to then straighten the church so I'm gonna hold down the shift key and start to straighten up I want this to be straight pretty cool huh okay so I can start and oh let's go over this side so I can really start to distort that building around if I have saw some distortion in the town that I didn't like let's see the distortion that works pretty well these buildings are a little bit hey rust that church is leaning already you know the church could have been leaning ah bit because it was a little on the old side but in general oh there's nothing let's see what we can do over here what do you think let's zoom back out because I think we can do more of a global one let's, draw down the side notice the curvature matches the side. I'm not gonna hold down the shift key this time I'm just gonna let it go because watch how I can then adjust this by clicking here on the control point, you'll find that you can then do a little bit more manual adjustment to the edges of your images and, you know, I'm not sure the way I'm going to delete that, uh, I like it, ok, let's, try it on the other side but you see the the really the great thing about adaptive wide angle it lets you adapt certain sections and make adjustments like I did hear point that looked good could tweet any comments and their comments from online I always have comments from I'm looking younger. In fact, angie says, oh, my goodness, mind blowing can't wait to use this mind mind better than gold that's what? It sounds like the sixties. Okay, um, this is mind blowing, okay, let's, keep on going. Um let's, zoom back out here a little bit on dh then I start to that looks pretty good if you're really really serious and let's just see what happens here I'm I'm I'm on a roll let's just see if I could see before and after did you see what I did there there road was not quite pointing toward the viewer so I cheated it of it you can really cheat the perspective really nicely not that I would cheat a photograph just to get more people to like me yeah, I just have to jump in here a moment if if lying a little bit on your manipulations of your photograph and it doesn't hurt any small children or a dogs or cats I will distort an image for the benefit of making it a better image I will will you do that just for you? I played the fifth oh I will no I refuse to ever change the size of the moon no no no that won't do that. None of you have done that before but I will distort you know if it if it makes for a more dramatic photo if that hill is a little bit higher I'll make that hill a little bit higher. Andi, I don't think it's gonna bother anybody and the hill is still the hill. I just wanted to make a point that I think it's okay to altar images within reason for artistic effect so I'll leave it there ok? How you hate mail yet I'm going to scale this up in size and then close this often show you a couple ways teo repair an image like this um I'm gonna leave some problems are along the edges I love the ability teo use the move tool here and then I can rhea justice I can put my horizon where I like it maybe right there and scale it I prefer to do the scaling here I'm getting very good results by doing this I remember we're using this smart object and question came up in class ones um I distorting and my losing quality should I do the scaling outside of this? I'm finding very, very good results scaling here what are you you what are you grimacing at me like I was out of my mind? Yeah no yeah you were you were questioned oh, this is scaling the smart object it is taking we see here is the before it's then taking this picture of pixels and changing their size were scaling it up to meet the size of our cropped area. We are there's only a certain number of pixels in that image and it either has to create more pixels and then that would be interpolated the scale or if it creates no pixel no pixels at all you're merely scaling the image and the pixels are getting you're having fewer pixels per inch that's a whole nother talk that jeff will be giving next week I mean you talk about something I scaled this non destructively I did not generate any new pixels no new information was scaled I'm taking the existing number of pixels inside that smart object and making them filled this space yes so if you start scaling this too far have you ever printed something out off printer and you've seen the lark this the actual cubes you've seen the pixels the when you start to print it, you'll see the the huge gigantic squares will appear and you don't have enough resolution to meet the resolution of the printer. We can see some of the noise and artifact ing this gentleman saw when you're scaling things up it's a good point how large can I make a gopro image? I've made a gopro image up to four feet tall uh and it's held up fairly well but if you view it from six feet away hey um typically I will ask jeff this one I've made a gopro image that looks pretty good on a thirteen by seventeen often absent printer with great looking quality but you can see it start to soften up and see the pixels on the excessive grain and softness it's a softness that appears when I print any uh guy fact I my color printer died a few years ago and I finally took it to e waste last summer so I am represents emotion print, printing your care and you know it just kept printing is back I really love my desktop epson um remember nothing really exists unless it's on paper well, you do have a point there because we did it all in the age of all law start over somewhere I really do do take a look at printing again it's very very high I love saying never mind okay moving on um smart object one of the other things that we want to take a look like in a smart object is liquefy now talk about warping pixels out um I use a really big brush and I want oh bend and distort this and notice I grabbed the pixels all the way into the image and then I slowly nudge them I don't put excessive stretch on try and see how I'm balancing the stretch so that no one can see it but I'm going to see little artifacts and problems there if I blew that up but for work on facebook you can get away with it here's another technique I use don't put your um your brush right in the middle and start to distort it grab it from the edge and I find it's a softer way of stretching the edges is is by grabbing with the edge of the brush and not the center of the brush sort of crazy so that's away that I've recently been doing so again a little bit of cheating there that cheat he spots up I used to do a phil and if you really are a purist and you don't like this stretching um uh you know want to stretch your pixels and have people see this the artifacts on the edges you khun do a content aware filled that's so last week yes you know the rules don't you yes again I'll have three questions is it possible to change the brush ape from like a grady into ah more hard edge if you wanted to well that I don't believe so no you got me you asked me this brush this bruce might brush I haven't done that a while um we've got pressure brush rate density brush size we're adjusting the overall attributes of the brush but you said this shape I've got size but not the shape I can't have a feather you that's the last efficient can't have it in a shape of some unusual thing like I could make a custom brush inside of photo shop I just want to point to go to the camera I just want the studio audience to know and those out watching in the world that I don't know everything there is to know about photo shop and you ask me to any questions you'll find that I have features and errors okay now that we've made that statement um now the answer is you're stuck with this but I think it works pretty well um okay okay quick we got to say something we click okay you know what I do to finish this all off okay quick um you know what I do after I've blended these images together and I don't and I think I have some of that color cast problem again I'll finish off my projects with a final levels adjustment and do that same thing we saw earlier with the red green and blue holding down the option or old key I can now see when the pixel start to change and I stopped the moment I see the first pixels appear on the image right there red let's see right there so I'll do one more pass let's see what this looks like up up up up up um before and after very little adjustment very little adjustment but all often cap off a project with one more pass of levels in case in the process of merging the images together it picked up a color cast okay we got to say something new okay moving on because your time is running out boy was okay it was this one this session was really boring okay um options we did that vertical this is a really great project that I'm gonna finish off with is a vertical panorama um this is photographed by romeo dir shirt of course after he took this photograph he proceeded to crash into the water no no he didn't he didn't crash romeo take this shot this I leave you with this one today uh just a za new creative option it's very simple to do goto one position in the sky point your camera straight out and either with the vision or vision plus or with a gopro that has the capability of rotating the camera point toward the horizon angle your camera down and take a second shot a third on a fourth I've only have four shots necessary I find the more photographs you take the better in some cases but here's how it works you got all these photos select them all they're all in the we want to blend these together but due to a feature in photoshopped you must rotate them first I'm using the command or control key on the keyboard combined with the open bracket the curly bracket and I'm rotating them now photoshopped thinks it's a panorama right? We open those oh I'm sorry our time's up isn't it way over in this off load files in the layers of course, ladies and gentlemen, girls and boys uh did you? You'll all assume that I color corrected those and I applied the lens profile right? That was an important and now they're coming in in the dimension romeo dallaire shires name several times because it's important to mention his name several times because I get bonus points because he's going to be working for me at my big event in desert at photoshopped world and jeff, aren't you going to be there as well? Okay, time's up we'll be teaching yeah, filler will be teaching everybody too actually fly at the photo shop world event ok do you all agree? I've got four images it it's going to pretend you can't merge them together vertically it gets confused rotate them um otto a line layers spirit kal is the correct answer I have found in some occasions if you take an enormous number of photos like incrementally and really just scads of them you can do a I reposition process on blend them together with some really great results but I like to spherical it usually works every time what if I close this often has failed okay it's romeo do shires fault if I fail click okay okay here we go cross your fingers three answers yes, so we now we then wait you have a bottle blandly late in the afternoon is otto blend layers it's a panorama and then, um image can kim and rotate clockwise she think thay check clockwise so I leave you with this one oh let's crop in on this just because we can let's just bring our edges in we could use um the tools that we saw earlier um tio go in and use our our war being tools to extend these edges but it's it's just a really, really interesting new perspective when you go to a location and photograph and I just want to point out that romeo disher is legally flying in this location because he's not in the park boundaries he's flying from outside the park he's flying over the land on dh the n away the noah regulations are that you have to be a mean tide would you all agree that he is at meantime he's not anywhere over the water so it's a perfectly legal photograph of pigeon point and he's taking these four photographs and stitching them together and it tells this beautiful blending of them so I leave you with that really creative new way too look at aerial perspective and some tips and techniques in photo shop to do this stuff jeff I think that concludes my day I hope that was helpful the audience most of the acro was sleeping a little today but I think I've watched your opening sessions I was really excited and I was so pleased to be here great well, we really appreciate having you here we really thank you. Thank you, theo competing for the prize over here standing I'm sorry he was up first give me your business card, doc once again where can everybody find you online? I'm most active unfortunately I'm I have the fad disease facebook addiction disorder and such a bad thing anybody have facebooked addiction disorder? Yeah in recovery it is a the best places to find out what's russ up to what are the latest tools? Whatever his latest demos just look for russell preston brown on facebook become a friend or become a follower I'm up to four thousand nine hundred and fifty how many did I get? Five thousand five thousand original signing now e just sent you a note while we were alive so I certainly hope you you send me a note that said please I did have something rolled and clyde, I'm getting particular either a have to be holding a camera in your hand and then I accept you automatically um be you write me a note and tell me why you need to be my friend but I'm not really fast on the trigger with inviting friends in I've let a few people in let's just say if you let those people and that he shouldn't have clicked on their names are usually family we owe you that he clear not watching let his family that's pretty bad so yes russell president brown that's the best place to see what I'm up to I post my image is there post my latest projects? I test out tutorials on poor helpless victims let's just close it off I just what do we have on my desktop? I have my do you want my web links here that's great this one the uh don't crop the the top one is the actual class that jeff and I are working on together. I can say photoshopped world here at photo shop world were teaching a class, and this is a great course, a hands on flying course, it's, all about video and video maneuvers. And the second is, you saw my first session, where I started off talking about the settings for the goal settings for the vision camera. And this video is, repeat the tips on video, that's, a repeat of that section as well. But vice, what they need, that they're already here, they can lost back in, right? Well, that was ridiculous. I can't believe why showed that exactly.

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

DSLRPros Coupons
After Effects Project and Files Bonus
Premiere Pro Project and Files Bonus
Drone Syllabus
Adorama Equipment Gear Guide
Gear Guide

Ratings and Reviews

fbuser da1b2c58
 

This is a great course! This workshop was very professionally put together. This was my first experience with CreativeLive and I was impressed at every turn with how well everything turned out. The content was engaging, the guests and instructor gave out many many useful tips on responsible drone operation... I can't say enough great things about this course. I'll be watching many of the segments over and over again to pick up all of the quick golden tips that were shared, as well as picking up the proper industry terms for types of shots, or piloting techniques. Very impressive! Thanks to Jeff Foster, his guests and the entire crew of Creative Live for making this happen. Simply Amazing!

a Creativelive Student
 

Not for experienced/informed pilots looking for the next level. It was a good intro for those new to the concept of UAV's in photo/video but never got specific enough about maneuvers, equipment, or shooting styles to be useful. The outdoor flying was a complete mess. Demos of what the equipment looked like, not how to best use it creatively. Glad I watched it live. The chat rooms were very informative.

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES