hi guys welcome and welcome back thanks so much for joining me today we're going to dive into the
wonderful world of panos how to actually shoot them and then how to stitch the images afterwards
so basically like i've just said today we're going to look at panos that's because it is
pano month in the monthly challenge and you guys specifically request that this video was created
and hence it exists now if you're new here then hi i'm Jess i'm a pretty decent portrait photographer
based out of England i upload regular tips and stuff to this youtube channel every single
Friday so if you don't want to miss anything hit the subscribe button hit the bell icon the
bell icon will give you a notification every single time i upload a youtube video upload
every single week and sometimes more than that if i feel like it and if i have time but without
further ado we're gonna jump into pano world so what is a pano image what's a panoramic image
the technical definition is a little bit blurred but most people agree that it is an image that is
at least two times as wide as it is tall or two times as tall as it is wide although the latter
is a little bit less frequently used so what that means basically is that it has to have at least a
ratio of two to one two to one on the sides basically makes that happen now technically
panos are usually created via multi-image stitching so what that is is essentially
you take multiple frames and move the camera as you take each frame so you're capturing
more of the scene in separate images rather than just cropping one image to a two to one ratio so
that's technically what is done now if there's a few things that help when you're doing this
to really nail a pano what you need to do is be able to help your editing software or
yourself if you're doing it manually to stitch the images well enough afterwards
now the easiest way of doing that is to follow the general rule which is to overlap each frame
by about a third so that the editing software has enough data to be able to also align and kind of
map the images in a wider scene so that's kind of number one overlap the frames by about a third
ish the second tip actually came from one of our premium members who is a very experienced
and fantastic landscape photographer based in New Zealand he is called Rob um Rob has been
really really helpful inside the MTog community and he had a really really great tip here and
what he suggested and this is all from him is that if you're shooting on a longer lens the
best way to grab a pano is to actually shoot in vertical orientation and shoot sideways if you're
shooting on a wider angle lens then it's easier and better in terms of the distortion to shoot
landscape to fill the kind of width of the frame all those little bits of theory are really useful
so what does it look like when you've actually shot them well on this screen right now i've got
an image of Finn which was shot in November of 2021 so a little bit of a while ago now this image
of Finn has been shot pretty correctly not using a tripod it is always best to use a tripod or a
specific landscape pano system i'm not an expert in this so i cannot advise but here is just one i
shot handheld so we've got little Finn Finn this is Finn who's my oldest dog he's a rescue he will be
about 10 to 13 years old so he's a little bit old right now and i wanted to grab this whilst
we were on holiday and just kind of like capture the colors in the scene so this is probably the
best example i can give you of one of my own pano setups and as you can see we've got him on leash
because he remains on leash in new locations and then we start sideways now as you can tell if i
was using a tripod this would be better aligned so we would have the correct amount of space
but you can see that certain elements like the tree here is overlapped so there's an overlap
in the images so this is in this image and then this bush is in this image do you get what i mean
and then the side of this tree is in this image so there's an overlap as the images were shot
and they look like this actually the editing process for this is really easy what i also
did in this one just to help me with my leash removal is i grabbed another empty frame so i
took Finn out and grabbed another empty frame which gives us this here and so editing it and
stitching it together is relatively simple if you shot it correctly in the first place
of course the inspiration for this challenge was actually Freki on the lock which is a different
image it's done quite well in international awards and that was shot as a pano but
not anywhere near as technically correctly as what we can see on the screen so that's why i'm using
this because otherwise that one's just kind of like you know a mess so here we've got our frames
what happens next well first thing that we can do is if we're not quite sure if it's going to come
out nicely as a pano is we can just use Lightroom's built-in tools to check so what you would do is go
ahead and right click down on the images that are all selected and then choose photo merge
and panorama that will give you a preview of what it's going to look like it's perfectly okay to do
it that way i just prefer to do this inside of photoshop so what i would do with all of these
here and set up is i would go ahead and right click on the images selected so i've selected
all of them on the timeline remember if you don't know how to select them you want to just go ahead
and click one hold down command or control click the next one and so on and so forth or
if you have them all just in a line you can hold down shift and then click the last one
and you've got all of them selected then we're going to go ahead and right click and on this
what i'm going to do is go into edit in in the menu and then we're going to go down
to merge to panorama in photoshop okay so this is where photoshop is going to help us to pick up
the slack now before i press this very important point make sure you've got the exact same develop
settings if you've done anything in Lightroom on all of the images that's very important
then we're going to go ahead and click merge to panorama in photoshop so when we've gone
into photoshop you're then met with this box here you can see an image that i'm working on in the
background there but we're just going to focus on the window so what you have are the options down
the left hand side personally i prefer to leave it on auto unless something really weird is happening
so we're going to make sure all of the source files are here and then down here in the bottom
this is where personal preference is going to come into it now remember in the reference image Finn
was on leash and i also had an empty shot so what i'm not going to do is blend the images together
even though that is the easiest and quickest way to do this i'm going to manually blend them a
little bit later on i just want photoshop to align them really nicely up in a pano and then i can
pick and choose which frames and which parts of each frame i want to blend so this is completely
up to you now in most situations i would have vignette removal on and geometric distortion
correction on the only exception to that is if you shot loads and loads and loads of different
frames for example like a 52 image pano which is something that i did do last year in which case
this can make things go a little bit weird but in most situations i would have those two selected
and then click ok so what that's going to do and you can see it on this side here is it's going to
go ahead and open up each of the images as a layer inside this file and then when it gets to the last
one it will start it's kind of like alignment procedure so instead of me having to sit and
manually do this photoshop is now sat aligning the layers and making sure that everything
looks really really nice and is going to blend together well now if you had the blend images
together selected then photoshop would also work to blend the edges and make sure it all looks nice
and clean of course like i said i don't do that so i'm not going to have that in this sometime later
okie coke here is our aligned image so you can see that we have all of the layers lined up and
we also have little Finn Finn somewhere in our layer list i think it would be this one yep so
i'm going to put Finn up at the top there because he's you know kind of an important part of this
and then i'm going to go from top to bottom adding masks if photoshop is terrifying for you go ahead
and check the beginner's three things or whatever it was youtube video it was useful you know it was
useful grabbing a mask grabbing a brush we're going to be on 100% and we want to be on black
and i'm going to go ahead and start to just blend this initial shot out so that it's nice and nice
and clean and we can also go and do the quickest leash removal you guys will have ever seen by just
going in and taking that out i'll perfect this a little bit later don't want to take too much
time on this and so we've taken the harsh edges off i'm then going to go ahead and look at the
next layer which is this one on the left add a mask and i'm going to go with my black brush and
because there was that overlap it means that i can quite safely run down the edges of the shot
and take the hard edges off but at the same time know that it's not going to be transparent pixels
behind because i shot with an overlap right okay so we've got this kind of nicely blended shot now
so then all that's left is to do a final crop make sure that you're obviously staying above your two
to one crop if you're concerned about getting that right go ahead and type two in one box one
in the other one and you'll end up with a two to one crop i'm going to crop this in just slightly i
don't want all of the space there and i also don't want to have to correct those edges remember you
don't have to stick to two to one you can go in and clear that and then manually move we don't
want too much of the foreground the background is fine i do want him a little bit more central but
this is okay i'm gonna delete the cropped pixels and then click okay on the image of Finn there's
been sat there that i could move him so that this tree is not coming out of his head by moving him
sideways and doing a select subject but i'm not going to do that in this instance because i take
too long right so i'm going to go ahead check my edges make sure everything's okay select all
of them and then i'm going to do a shift option command e which will make us a new merge layer
all of those can be grouped together and turned off and we can work from this and then we can
start doing our clean up and our continuation edit and everything else is fine so the main priority
at this point when you're doing these edits is to ensure that you do not have repetition so there's
a bit here that i need to clean up and that you also don't have any transparent pixels we can see
that we've got transparent pixel and a line i'm going to want to go around that and make sure that
that is not visible now these things would not happen if you use photoshop's merge tools
you just need to be a little bit more eagle-eyed and aware but this is now set up as a pano that
you can work from and continue your edit that's how you work and stitch a pano in
photoshop hopefully this was helpful for you if it was drop it down in the comments below if you have
any questions about this drop them down in the comments below just drop it down in the comments
below hit the like button be a nice person and i'll see you all again really really soon