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Panorama

Lesson 6 from: Working With Camera Raw

Colin Smith

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Lesson Info

6. Panorama

Lesson Info

Panorama

One of the things we can do here is we can create panoramas. And if anyone knows anything about me, which if you don't that's fine, I'm not that arrogant that I think the whole world knows who I am. But the dozens of people that know who I am, I love to do a lot of stuff with panoramas and with drones. So, by the way, check out my Instagram: photoshopcafe. I'm just going to plug that in, if you want to see my drone images. 'Cause I'm not going to have time to show them to you now. So these are some of the drone images that I've shot in Hawaii recently. And one of the things that I love to do with the drone is shot panoramas, 'cause it's just beautiful. It's amazing. So, we're going to do the same thing we did before. I've got these DNG files and I'm just going to double click and I'm going to open all of these in Camera Raw. Here we are, and if we go down here in the film strip, there's a left and notice what I'm doing. I'm just rotating this drone around and shooting this beautiful vi...

sta here. There's Diamond Head right there. So, this is a Waikiki Beach which I hope to return to this summer. I love this spot. Anyone been to Hawaii? I love Hawaii. I've only been to three islands so far, Waikiki, Oahu, the big island, and Maui. So, I'd like to get some other islands in. So, what we can do is put these together and we can stich them together. But one of the things that's really key when you're working with a panorama, is before you go in and you start trying to stich it, sometimes we need to go under here. Notice I've got all the images selected by the way. Let me just show you that. I think you click on here, you can choose select all, see that? Or Control + A or Shift + click, like I did. So make sure you select them all, 'cause if you do select them all, and we adjust this, notice it updates all the photos. See the photos in the film strip? So it updates them all together. I'm not so much worried about the color balance right now. There's one thing you really need to do before you stitch a panorama. That's to go under the Profiles here. Under Lenses Correction, notice I've enabled it. If I don't enable it, and all these individual ones are warped, there's a good chance that the panoramic stich is going to fail. So, very important, you want to go and go to the profile and apply your profiles right here, it's the DJI Phantom 3. How did it know that? Here's the Phantom 4 and believe it or not it was a while ago, I show that in the Phantom 3 Pro. If I was going to go back now, I should have done the Phantom 4. But don't be tempted to choose the wrong one. It's not going to turn it into a photo from that other camera. (laughter) Alright, so we've got that there and then what it's done is it's got the geometric distortion, it's all it's doing is just getting rid of the fish so that it will stich better. So now we go back up to the very thing that we did before under here and instead of HDR, we go down to Panorama and it's going to think, think, think, think, think. And voila! That's actually really fast thinking, because if you think about that, these are not little JPEG files that I'm showing you right there, those are full size RAW files. So, that's a lot of thinking. If we look at it here, it says this is what the panorama, it hasn't stitched it yet. It's actually letting me make some decisions, because this is what it will look like if we stich it what do you think? Yeah, that looks pretty cool, I think I might go for that. But what happens if I chose Cylindrical, just in case. I know what it will do, spoiler alert, it's going to stretch everything this way. But let's do it and pretend we didn't know. Oh look, it stretched it that way. So, sometimes it might look good, but most of the time you're going to find that spherical is going to look the best. Now we got some other things. Auto Crop, what's that? Well, have you ever done a panoramic, anyone ever worked on a panorama? Yeah, you never get a nice square edge like that. Never, are you kidding me? So what it did is it cropped automatically. If I turn it off, that's what it really looks like. You liar. (students laugh) So those are the edges, but here's the cool thing. What if you want some of that information? 'Cause if I auto crop it's like, whoa, I'm losing some sky, I'm losing some ground. What if I want some of this information right here in the sky or in the edges? Well there's this cool little feature, it's called Boundary Warp. Now, Boundary Warp is, I'm into chewing gum today, So earlier on we talked about Jim stepping in the gum and stretching it, for the Pan tool. Well this is like the gum, but you remember the days that, maybe they don't do it any more, but now I think about it, why would they, so unhygienic. But back in the day we used to get gum, and they printed on it. Kids today are smarter, and they don't feed kids ink. What were they thinking? (laughter) Is that why our generation turned out the way we are? So don't blame us kids, they put ink in our chewing gum, okay. (laughter) So, anyway you used to get the gum and it used to have things printed on it. And it was fun because you could stretch it, and you could pull it, and you could do different things. You guys know that? But you probably had play doughs like, 'Do Not Eat'. So here's a cool thing, it does the same thing. So if we take the Boundary Warp, and pull this, look at this, it grabs the picture, stretches it like a drum, and boom, every single pixel is preserved. Not one single pixel is thrown away. It just stretched it to fit that rectangular shape. There we go, so if that's not reusability, what is? So we've done that, now we can click merge, and once again it's going to create a new file, which is gong to be a DNG file. If I open that up, you can see. See that? Pano, blah, blah, blah, and this is the DNG. And of corse it's a DNG because it's saving up all the dynamic range, and all the information, and it does the same thing that would happen inside of ACR. There's our pano there. Yeah! I love that. So we can go in here now and we can adjust it. Let's make it brighter. Let's make it sunnier. Punch a little contrast in there even though I told you not to. Recover the highlights like mad. When you work on a drone picture by the way, you always want to start to push the highlights all the way to the left. Because, you can never get enough detail out of those clouds. We are going to go up here and push our whites a little bit, blacks to give us some body. Getting close. A little aggressive on the blacks. Get a little Clarity. Now, this is where the Dehaze is just going to kick in. Look at that, nice. Give a little touch of Vibrance. And finally just going to tweak that exposure again just to make it work for that. And then, open object, so still a smart object, Why is it still a smart object? Because I forgot to apply a color profile. So let's double click go back into it again, and let's apply a color profile. Why don't we do that one that we made. That's trippy. Vintage. Vintage areal shot of Hawaii. (students laughing) Just like they use to do drones back in the day. (laughter) And looking at that now, we're like, "Dude, why did you pick that?". Okay, we'll double click, get back here. Let's click, okay, okay, let's go under basic color. Yeah, now everything's back to normal. Saved the picture. Alright, so that's using panoramas inside of ACR. Pretty crazy, huh?

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