From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

Creating a Panoramic Photo in Lightroom

From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

Creating a Panoramic Photo in Lightroom

- Hi, my name is Chris Orwig and thanks for joining me in this episode of Photo Tools Weekly. In this episode, we're gonna take a look at how we can craft and build a panoramic photograph from right inside of Lightroom. Are you ready? Well, let's begin. This first panoramic photograph that we're going to create is gonna illustrate a few things. First, it's gonna show us how we can use this tool and, second, it's gonna show us how powerful it actually is. We'll be working with these files. They're JPEGs and you can see I was just handholding my camera and changing my perspective and my exposure wasn't even really that good. It wasn't consistent throughout but even with this exposure variation, this tool's gonna be able to take these frames and help us to make a beautiful pano photograph. This first step is to select the images. You can do that here in the Filmstrip or press the G key and do it in the Grid View, click and then shift-click to select those images. Next, go to Photo, Photo Merge and then Panorama. So again, step one, select the images, step two, Photo, Photo Merge, Panorama. When we click on this, what it will do is it will send the files over to Panorama Merge Preview and here it's gonna do its best job of trying to bring all of these images together. Now, keep in mind, I was hand holding my camera so you can see here that we have a lot of variation. My edge isn't very clean. With that, we have two options. We could either choose to turn on Auto Crop and, I should point out, you can always change the crop later so don't worry. You aren't deleting information forever. Or you can use something called Boundary Warp or use these two together. What Boundary Warp does is, as we drag this over, is it helps to reposition the content and really kinda stretch it out to the edge of the frame and it tries to maintain so that things are level, the horizons look good, and, with this pano, it does a phenomenal job. In my own experiences, what I find is that, for most images, I bring it somewhere up around 70 and then I crop off the rest. If you go too far, you can get some distortion on the edges and some others places. We'll see that in the next movie but I just wanted to highlight that for now. Next, I should also say that the projection that typically works best is Spherical as well. So next, we'll simply click Merge and what that will do is it will create this merged image. It will save that out as a DNG file format which is a great format, lots of flexibility with that, and it will integrate it into our Lightroom catalog here. And you can see that, down below, we now have this image. If we want to work on it, let's go over to the Develop Module. I'm gonna collapse the panels on the left so we can see this a little bit better. You know, some things that you may want to do here, perhaps, is crop so here I'll tap the R key. Notice how I still have access to all of this information, the edge there that we had auto-cropped away. We can also change our composition right here so I could bring this in on each side, if I wanted to change the overall look of this photograph and then double-click in order to apply the crop. You can go through your normal workflow here. Maybe add a little bit of contrast, bring up some shadows, some clarity, some vibrancy, change the color temperature a little bit, cool things off just a touch, or make selective adjustments as well. Here, I'll select the tool which allows us to make adjustments and, what I want to do, is change my temperature here so I'm gonna warm this up and just click and drag over this part of the image. Currently, it's the wrong part of the image so I need to invert that. If you aren't familiar with these type of adjustments, I have a lot of training on Lightroom and how you can work with things like this but just to highlight a little bit on that, you can see that I have this adjustment which is inside of that shape there. It's a nice soft edge. Increase the feather. I'm just adding a little more warmth into that part of the image. You can see how we can move that around and add a little bit there. Also, I want to recover some of those highlights, too, so I'll bring that down as well. Alright, well, at this point, you can see that we've created a pretty good panoramic photograph. I'll click Done in order to apply those settings. The craziest thing, at least to me, is that we created this without hardly any effort, handholding a camera, capturing those frames. A couple of tips here is shooting vertically tends to give you more space and flexibility and, also, almost always capture more than you think that you need because that gives you the flexibility for cropping that you might need to do later because it's really hard to compose when you're moving your camera frame by frame. Alright, well that wraps up our first look at how we can work with panoramic photographs. If you want to take a deeper look into how to work with this feature, you can do so in the next movie.

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