- This video is sponsored by Capture One.
The brand new version, Capture One 22,
is available now at the link in the description.
So use that link,
and you can start your 30 day free trial today.
Okay, tell me if you've ever been in this situation:
You're at the perfect spot.
The light is absolutely incredible.
You're ready to get set up,
to get the most legendary composition ever.
And you don't have a lens wide enough
to cover the whole scene.
Or how about this one?
A beautiful day,
super bright sky, sun rays rocking down
onto the picturesque valley,
and you're a bit worried about blowing out your highlights.
So you back off the exposure a bit,
but then your shadow areas get all mushy
when you try to recover them in the edit.
But then the other shot that you took just in case,
you clipped the highlights,
and there's no getting them back.
In today's video,
we're going to go over
two different photography shooting techniques
that you can use to solve these problems,
using the brand new
Panorama Stitching and HDR Merge features in Capture One 22.
But before we get into the software side of things,
we need to talk about what these techniques are,
why you might want to shoot this way,
and what you need to know
while you're actually out there shooting,
so that you get the results you want,
once you do get it into the software,
let's start with the Panorama Stitch function.
The quick explanation of Panorama Stitching in Capture One,
is that you can take a bunch of photos of your scene,
and the software will automatically find where they overlap,
and stitch them all together to make one big photo.
Like I mentioned at the start,
if you don't happen to have a lens
that's wide enough for your scene,
this can be one way to get around that.
But that's not the only reason
why you might want to shoot this way.
Another really great side effect of shooting panoramas
is the extra resolution.
So I can shoot one photo with a wide angle lens,
and get a 24 megapixel photo,
or I can shoot a panorama and end up
with a hundred megapixels or more in the photo,
depending on the overlap, and the size of the final product.
Another great thing about shooting panoramas
is the ability to get detail shots,
and your final wider shot, at the same time.
You might like one of the photos by itself,
but it can also be a part of the bigger picture.
This is super handy
if you're sharing those photos together
in a set online.
Okay.
So when you're out shooting,
here's a couple of tips to get panoramas that work.
Ideally, you want to use a tripod
to try and keep the perspective of each shot the same.
I'll be honest.
I break this rule pretty much all the time,
and my panoramas generally turn out pretty good.
But if you're going for optimal results,
a tripod is a good idea.
They do actually make fancy panoramic heads
that are designed to keep your perspective
absolutely perfect.
But again, it's not completely necessary,
just a potential extra, if you really want to,
you want to shoot in manual exposure,
and with manual focus,
and don't change anything between shots.
This can mess up the stitching.
General rule of thumb
is to shoot to have 20% or more overlap in your shots.
I like to turn on the rule of thirds grid on my camera,
and I'll line up the right third on one shot
to the left third on the next shot,
so that technically I have a 33.3 repeated percent overlap
in each shot.
And you can actually stitch together multiple rows as well.
So it doesn't just have to be straight across.
You can do a top row, and a bottom row,
or whatever you think will be best
to capture the aspect ratio that you want in the end.
And finally, when shooting,
give yourself lots of extra space to crop.
Whatever you want your final photo to look like,
make sure that you take some photos beyond those boundaries.
You'd rather have too much than not enough.
Now let's hop into Capture One,
and I'll show you how their new Panorama Stitching feature
makes this super easy
without ever having to leave the software.
So I've got my panorama shots
all imported into my Capture One session.
The first thing that I want to do,
is go to my lens correction,
and make sure that the distortion correction,
and light fall off, is applied to the individual shots.
So if you've got any kind of vignetting, or distortion,
that's going on with your lens,
you want to fix that before you stitch the photos together
to help with making the stitching easier.
Then all we're going to do is select the photos
that we want to stitch together,
by clicking the first one,
and shift clicking on the last one in our browser.
Then right click on one of the photos,
and choose Stitch to Panorama.
Now we'll wait for it to generate a preview for us.
And we've got a couple of options in the top left corner.
The first option we've got is the projection style.
These options are going to apply the stitching
with slightly different settings,
depending on how you shot the photo,
and also how you want it to look in the end.
Each one has a little graphic next to it,
to show you how it goes about the process.
But in the end, what I suggest doing
is clicking each of them,
letting it make a preview for you,
and deciding which one you think makes the most sense
for your photo.
Some people will want to choose
based on what they think looks the most natural.
And some people will just want to choose
based on what they think looks best.
Once you pick the projection you like best,
there's an option below to choose the stitch size.
This'll tell you what the final megapixel count is
of your stitched photo.
But it depends on which projection you choose.
If you don't want to end up with a huge file
on your computer, or you don't need all those megapixels,
you can choose to scale it down a bit,
or go with a hundred percent,
to keep the resolution as high as it possibly can be.
After we hit ok,
Capture One will take a second
to stitch the photos together,
and create a new file for you.
Next, we can crop the image down,
to get rid of any black space on the outside,
and get the ideal composition that we want.
And we can apply our edit
using the rest of the tools in Capture One.
The next new feature that we have in Capture One 22,
is the HDR Merge feature.
And if you've ever found yourself in a situation
where you were either going to have to clip the highlights,
to keep the dark parts of a photo bright enough,
or to push the shadows into oblivion,
to protect the highlights,
this is going to be great for you.
The idea here is that we take multiple photos
of the same composition,
but we expose shots to protect the shadows,
and other shots to protect the highlights.
Then Capture One will combine the photos together,
to give you the complete dynamic range of all the photos.
Most cameras have a function
that will automatically shoot different exposures for you,
called bracketing.
But this can also be done manually.
The settings depend a little bit
on the situation specifically,
but ideally take three to five images
at somewhere around two stops apart,
by varying your shutter speed.
So for example, I could shoot one shot
at one one-hundredth of a second,
one at one four hundredths of a second,
and one at one sixteen hundredths of a second.
The first shot being an overexposed shot,
the second one being in the middle,
and the third one being an underexposed shot,
to protect the highlights.
Like with the panorama shots,
a tripod is a really great idea
to keep your composition lined up nicely,
but also like the panorama shots.
I like to ignore this, and shoot handheld,
using the bracket setting on my camera.
And then I'll just let Capture One
take care of the alignment for me.
Speaking of which let's hop into Capture One,
and I'll show you how to combine your shots.
So, once again,
we've got our photos imported into our session
in Capture One.
We can see that we've got one
where the sky is completely blown out.
We are not getting that detail back.
But these trees in the foreground are nicely exposed.
Then in this other shot, our sky looks a lot better,
much more detailed, but the trees are darn near black.
And then I have a shot that's kind of in the middle as well.
I shot these using the bracketing feature,
built into my camera and it was just handheld.
And you can see that they aren't perfectly lined up
because of that.
Notice when I flipped through them,
the edge of the frame kind of slightly shifts a little bit.
So let's select all three of these,
by clicking the first one,
and then shift clicking the third one.
I'm going to right click on the middle exposure,
and then choose Merge to HDR.
We've got two options here.
We can choose auto adjust, which just means
after Capture One merges the photos together,
to give you all that dynamic range.
It's also going to try to adjust the photo
to what it thinks looks good.
Some people like to use this as a starting place
for their edit.
Some people just turn it off, and do it all manually.
I like to leave it on and see what capture one does.
But if I don't like it,
it's easy to reset the adjustments on the merged photo.
The other option we have is Auto Align,
which will automatically align the different photos for you.
And for shaky hands mcnotripod over here,
that's usually a pretty good idea.
Once we hit, okay, Capture One will take a second
to create the merged photo and apply any adjustments.
And we have a new file in our library.
Now, the first thing you want to do,
is check your edges for any problems with the alignment,
and crop in accordingly.
Again, if you're using a tripod,
this probably won't be an issue.
But that's what I get for being lazy.
As long as you were holding pretty still though,
it shouldn't be that big of a problem.
As you can see, we've got a nicely exposed sky
with all the dimension of the clouds,
but we've also got the trees in the foreground
nicely exposed too.
You can see the adjustments that Capture One made.
And if we want to reset those,
we can see what the basic merge looks like.
Without any of the edits,
it still looks quite a bit overexposed.
But within the file itself,
we have so much more dynamic range information to work with.
So now when we pull down those highlights,
we actually can see the detail.
If we go to our overexposed single-shot
and try and pull down the highlights to recover the sky,
we can never really recover all of those blown out details.
If we do the same thing with the HDR Merge,
see how nice those clouds look,
and the detail that we managed to keep.
Our shadows aren't actually too bad
in the photo that was underexposed,
and Sony absolutely crushes it at recovering shadows.
But if we zoom into the dark area,
and try and recover the detail in the shadows,
you will see that we get back a little bit more detail
in the HDR version.
In the regular version,
the shadowy areas get a little bit mushy and soft.
Now a word to the wise:
With great dynamic range, comes great responsibility.
It's super easy to overdo it with the edit,
and make things look really unnatural,
when you have that much dynamic range to work with.
People refer to this as a photo looking HDR,
but it's basically when a photo
looks like it was actually impossible
to have actually happened.
Generally, if you take the highlights all the way down,
and the shadows all the way up, on any photo,
you can kind of get this effect.
So be careful.
So with that said, we can do a quick edit on this photo,
and we're good to go.
So that is the brand new Panorama Stitching,
and HDR Merge function in Capture One 22.
I'm so excited to have both of these functions
built into Capture One now,
because it's gonna make the workflow so much easier
for this type of shooting.
And it just works really well.
Like I mentioned at the start,
if you're interested in checking out Capture One,
there's a link down in the description.
You can use that to start a 30-day free trial,
so you can check out these features for yourself.
Huge thank you to Capture One for sponsoring this video.
I am planning on doing a lot more photo editing content
in 2022.
So make sure to leave any questions, or suggestions,
or ideas that you have, down in the comments.
And on your way down there,
make sure to hit that like and subscribe button,
hit the bell notification,
so you don't miss out on future reviews and tutorials.
Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.