From the course: Creating 360-Degree Panoramas and Interactive Tours

Developing with Adobe Camera Raw

From the course: Creating 360-Degree Panoramas and Interactive Tours

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Developing with Adobe Camera Raw

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- Let's take a look at developing some panoramic files. In this case, I'm gonna use Adobe Bridge and the Camera Raw plug-in. You can actually run Camera Raw on non-raw files, but I highly recommend shooting raw if your camera supports it. Once I've launched Bridge, I can click to go right to my Desktop under Favorites. And I've copied the images to my Desktop and we'll use folder 11. In this case, go right into the source file and you'll see a panoramic image that was shot. This is one of the one's we did in Washington, D.C. Let's switch over to an icon view and you'll get the idea. And essentially this is the Lincoln Memorial at sunset. What we have here is a series of panoramic images. And different exposures to deal with. So, easy enough, with these images selected, I'm gonna get a good base exposure. Now, in this case, I'll select all of the images by pressing Command or Control + A. You can also choose, Edit, Select All. Then with a right click, I'll choose Open in Camera Raw. This hands off all the images into Adobe Camera Raw. First up, scroll down to the bottom and click on your Workflow Options. It's important that you set these up correctly. This is how the files will actually be processed or handled. I'm gonna go ahead and tell this to just stay pretty simple. We'll go into the ProPhoto 16 bit per channel and I'll leave everything at the current size. Now I shot this on an A7R2, so it's 42 megapixels, which is pretty big and a lot of processing. If you're using an older computer or don't have as much processing power, you can actually resize that and drop it down to different megapixel counts. Using a smaller file if your system doesn't have quite the power. For example, we can go with 20 megapixels here. And that's still plenty of resolution. Now, I'll tell it to Sharpen and I'll leave that be, but the Screen option is pretty good if you're intending to do multimedia delivery. Otherwise, you could target your type of paper. That looks good. I've got it set to 16 bits per channel. And I'm working in ProPhoto RGB. If you're more comfortable with Adobe RGB, that's fine too. Click OK. Now, choose an image that's representative of all the rest. I'm gonna actually go a little bit later here into this hero image and use this as my basis. With the first tab here on exposure, I'm just gonna adjust things. Let's start by lifting up the Shadows a little bit. And recovering the Highlights. That sort of gives me an opposite spectrum. Now this was shot raw, with the intention of shooting at a shorter shutter speed, so that we wouldn't get too long of blurry people or streaks of motion. Because it's raw, I've got plenty of room there though to lift it up. Do keep in mind that this is supposed to look like it's at night, so don't push it to a bright blue sky. That looks pretty good. And you can continue to refine. A small amount of Clarity is okay. And be careful about overdoing Vibrance or it'll get too rich. Once that feels pretty good, go to the next tab, which is the Curve. I tend to prefer a little bit of contrast. The medium contrast curve works pretty nicely. Looking at that front tab there, I'd like this to lift just a little more. So I'm gonna bring up the exposure just a bit. And actually push the Blacks a little and pull the Whites down. Not bad. Remember, you can see a split screen or side by side view by clicking to see the comparison right there at the bottom of the window. Cycling these views is just the letter Q which will allow you to explore different choices. Alright, that's looking pretty good. Let's make a few more adjustments. Looking at the curve here, I'm just gonna take the highlights down just a little. And lift the shadows just up a tad more. That feels pretty good. Next is Sharpening. Holding down the Option or ALT key, you can drag the amount and then pull over the mask so that you're not sharpening the sky. Holding down that Option or ALT key makes it easy to see the edges. And we'll bring out some detail and the Radius so it's more aggressive. So we've got nice, clean lines. That's looking really good there. We can easily read the text. Now, taking a look, there's a little bit of noise. So I'm gonna clean that up a little. And let's explore the noise really up here in the sky and make sure that it stays pretty clean. That looks pretty good there with the noise reduction. Remember, you can hold down the Option key as you drag there as well to play with the amount of detail and the smoothing until it looks good. Alright, I like that. Let's fit that into view. And now, we'll go over one more tab to the HSL/Grayscale. In this case, there's a whole bunch of sliders. But what I want you to really do is just come up top and grab the targeted adjustment tool. Let's start with Luminance. Now we can click on an area and it drags that slider down. Notice I darken the blue. I like that. While we're at it, let's desaturate that blue a little bit too so it's not so rich. Or if you wanted it richer, pop it up. You see how that works nicely. Gives you total control over those areas. There's some green tones here I don't like, so let's tone those down, but boost the yellows a little. And this allows you to make a custom mix. Easily as you drag these, you can lighten or darken different areas based on a color range. Easy way to do that is just the tool here. And so we can say, oh, let's adjust the Luminance and just lift that up and now we're just adjusting the brightness of the Lincoln Memorial by having it adjust the right amount of the orange and yellow slider. That feels pretty good. The next tab is for Split Toning, you don't need to worry about that. And now we're getting into Lens Correction which is a great time to take a more in-depth look.

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