TWIP

John Worthington Says:

18 March 2008 at 9:11 pm.

Thank you Alex. I have been trying to do something like this manually in Ps for months.

Panoramic Shots for the next TWIP Photo Challenge!

Also, just personally, in the past few weeks I have discovered (or allowed myself) my deep love of photography and digital imaging specifically from TWiP. Stuff like Panorama’s, HDRs and lighting / shutter speeds have kept my frustrated hobby from becoming an obsesive passion. I would really like to personally thank Scott, Alex and the team for helping me find what I love and express whats in my head. And the fact my daughter is almost 2 and, based on the fire you guys help stoke, I got her a digital camera for her birthday so she can share it makes it extra special.

PS. My wife now hates driving with me on weekends cause I’m stopping every 10 minutes to take a HDR or spot locations to come back and shoot.

J

John Worthington Says:

19 March 2008 at 4:28 pm.

Joe,

Since watching this episode I have made over 15 panoramic shots. I too faced the same problem as you. Then it hit me… I have Photoshop.

I created a file the size of my local photo store’s largest paper size and arranged a few panos on the page to maximise printing. This should work for you on your printer and even if you only have one pano shot, it’s good to have copies (trust me, everyone will want a copy)

Sean Says:

19 March 2008 at 10:04 pm.

Alex,
Just curious, How do you edit your photo’s for your pano. Do you edit each individually or do you go ahead with the merge then edit. By edit i mean the regular stuff. Color, contrast, maybe a little curves. I feel that if i edit each seperate they might not look good side by side, for example my first attempt at this was 6 pictures in the later evening time. The exposure for the shots with the sun to my back were different for the ones to the side how do i get it to look fluid.

Joe Rodricks Says:

24 March 2008 at 3:05 pm.

So there I was, a beautiful day, with a lot of family over for Easter. To get away from the crowd, my girlfriend and I took some of the younger kids for a romp in the woods. I had my 55-200 lens on because I was outside shooting some of the kids and I prefer the blurred background that a longer focal length can get me.

So off on the adventure we went. I shot some things but was more enjoying the kids and weather than looking for shots. When I did look up, across the small field we were on, I saw a marvelous tree. It was vast and I knew it wasn’t going to fit in my lens.

I backed myself as far away as I could (just enough to sink deep in the wet ground). Still no luck. I can only get maybe 1/4 of the tree in my field of view. Bummer, the light’s perfect and the clear blue sky, as it often does, is begging to be a backdrop.

Then the I had an epiphany. I’ll take a bunch of shots and see if I can’t stitch them together in Photoshop. So I shot the tree. 9 shots, shaped like a box with 3 down the middle and 3 on each side.

It was all quick and roughly done. It was all hand-held and the camera was in aperture priority mode. So I shot the 9 pictures thinking I done a fair job in covering the tree.

I didn’t get home until late on Easter so it wasn’t until today when I got home from work that I had a chance to see my pictures. Well there’s all sorts of bare branches in the shots. There is dead thin brush all over the bottom third. Because of the bright sun, I had a quick exposure, which gave me nice crisply sharp photos.

I imported the 9 shots into Photoshop and set the PhotoMerge to auto. AMAZING! Out came a flawlessly blended and an enormous picture. It must have been all the contrasty branches that gave Photoshop no short supply of lines to overlap. My 2 Ghz 4 Gig of RAM iMac took less than a minute to merge and blend nine 6-megapixel images.

Now it turns out that I didn’t shoot wide enough to the left or right to get a good crop. So my merge will go wasted…. this time.

But the moral of my story and a HUGE lesson learned for me is this:
Photoshop can do one heck of a job at stitching shots together and this is vastly useful when one can’t get back far enough to frame the shot you want. There is a practical limit in substituting a merged photo for a wide-angle lens. One will foreseeably encounter perspective distortion if you get carried away, with a subject that’s way too close but when all you need is a few less mm of focal length and it’s not available, don’t give up.

Scott Strecker Says:

25 March 2008 at 1:12 pm.

Is is suggested to set the camera to manual exposure or can Photoshop take care of this too? Would this be possible in RAW mode?

markwilson.it » Diary of a business traveller: when it all comes together Says:

20 May 2008 at 4:40 pm.

[...] just how easy this is to produce in Photoshop CS2 (even better in CS3, as Alex Lindsay describes in episode 12 of This Week in Photography) - just go to the File menu, select Automate and then Photomerge. After this, select the images, [...]