What’s Your Preference?

Ewie · #1 (**permalink**) 06-16-2008, 01:32 AM

My local Flickr group had a meetup this weekend out at Piha on the west coast about 40mins from Auckland. We had a great afternoon and took some great shots.

I've always been into creating horizontal panormamic mosaic images but have been experimenting with vertoramas lately and thought I'd share the process I went through to create this latest image. I've split the tutorial into 2 parts due to forum posting limitations.

For those who have'nt figured it out yet, a vertorama is simply a panorama comprising 3 or more images stitched or blended vertically.

In this shot we were dealing with the Kite Kite (proun; kitty kitty) falls and I was shooting from only about 8-10 meters in front of the waterfall rockface. In addition there was a significant dynmaic range between the darks shadows of the rocks to the highlights of the sky overhead.

So, after selecting an appropriate exposure for the different parts of the scene to make sure the important details would be captured correctly, I set my camera on a steady tripod (a must) and took my first shot to take in the foreground water and rocks.

Image 1 - Foreground detail

The second to takes in more of the waterfall and surrounding foliage

Image 2 - Middle detail

and my third to take the top of the waterfall, ridgeline and sky.

Image 3 - Top detail

As you can see the images were overlapped by quite a bit as I like to play it safe, but generally you should aim for 20-30% overlap if possible to make stitching and blending easier.

You will also note in image 3 that the sky is over-exposed, so I took a couple more shots to expose for the sky.

Image 4 - Sky exposure

Blending and poste processing techniques in part 2.

Ewie · #2 (**permalink**) 06-16-2008, 01:35 AM

In part 1 I summarized how I took three mains shots (vertically) of the waterfall and took an extra shot of the upper portion to expose for the sky.

After downloading the images onto my PC, I tweaked basic exposure settings in Lightroom making sure that the tweaks were synchronized for images 1-3.

Then using Photoshop CS3, I blended images 3 and 4 to improve the exposure of the sky and ridgeline. This was done by opening both images and using the move tool, dragging image 4 into image 3. Holding the shift key as you do this ensures that both images align. Then I applied a black adjustment mask and painted in the areas of the sky that I wanted.

This was the result; Image 3a - blended sky

The next step was to remove any pixel noise by processing the three images in Noise Ninja, again making sure that the same settings were applied to all three images.

The 3 images were then stitched using the panorama blend tool in Photoshop CS3 to create a single image. After stitching, blending and cropping the image, I applied some further enhancement in Photoshop to improve contrast, sharpness and clarity to produce the final result.