In this video I'm going to show you how to use Lightroom to create a panorama
photo and make this final image
Hi! My name is Tim shields. I'm a landscape photographer and I'm going to
show you how to edit a panorama image inside of Lightroom. This is an image of
Spirit Island it is located in Jasper National Park. It is a place that is very
near and dear to my heart and I'm going to show you how I created this image.
I've got Adobe Lightroom open and I've got the five images selected that we are
going to make this panorama with. Before we assemble I just want to point out the
histogram and it's very important just to note that on this particular morning
the background was very bright the sky was bright and you can see that none of
the highlights are hitting the right-hand side and that's because I
always expose for the brights and that means that the darks on the left-hand
side of the histogram are going to be underexposed but I can always bring
those back because I'm shooting in RAW that's really the key here you've got to
be shooting landscape photos in raw and if you still have your camera set to jpg
I encourage you set it to raw I've got the five photo selected underneath on
the bottom row here and I took this particular panorama from left starting
on the left side moving to the right and I like to do it in that order because
you can see it logically across the bottom of your Lightroom screen so the
first thing I want to do is edit a photo one of the five photos that has the
brightest background and I'm going to choose this middle one I want to make
sure I'm in the develop module of Lightroom and I'm going to start at the
very top I'm gonna warm this up a little bit the just by bumping up the
temperature and add a little bit of tint or magenta but not too much I don't want
to see the magenta I don't want it to be noticeable so I'm going back to
I've got a 15 on the screen that looks about right next I'm just going to
glance at my histogram and I can see that there is still maybe a little bit
of room on the right-hand side to brighten it up but I'm going to drop the
highlights right down to minus 100 open up the shadows to plus 100 and then look
at the histogram again and I can see that the overall shape of the histogram
is a little close to the left hand side which means I can afford to bump it up
just a touch but it depends on what mood I'm looking for I just wanted to a plus
point 1 9 now let's adjust the white point I'm
holding down the Alt key and sliding slowly to the right until I start to see
some pixels so here I've gone too far because this represents blown out
highlights and I'm going to leave it about here these are the areas of snow
on the distant mountains I'm letting go now let's do the same with the Black
Point hold down the alt drag to the left anything that I see now will be
completely black or a crushed black and I'm going to drop it in about there I do
like to have some blacks in my photos because blacks create contrast now we've
got the clarity and D haze sliders this dehaze slider I love this thing this is
the secret to making landscape photos look fantastic because when you increase
the D haze it creates more contrast see I've got it up to 15 here if I go a
minus on the on the D haze look at that it's just sort of a foggy effect that's
not what I want I like contrast e saturated photos I'm going to leave it
at 13 now I'm going to bump up the clarity a little bit which tends to
adjust contrast in more of the highlights slowly bump that up I don't
want too much because if you go too high it gives more of an HDR look and
although I used to like that years ago I definitely do not love it now next is
the vibrance let's bump up this via I'm gonna leave it at the 38 I like to
see the color on this one saturation I'm leaving this alone I
don't touch the saturation but I do adjust saturation on the individual
colors so make sure that out of these three here hue saturation and luminance
that saturation is highlighted I generally go for the orange right off
the top and I'm bumping that up because that's what's going to change the color
of this background that warmth there bump up some yellow and that also brings
out color in the greens and the blue is going to touch up the sky looking nice
let's just move up the green just a bit see how that looks I like it leave that
at an 8 I'm leaving the purple the magenta the
Aqua we do have some aquas in the water here so let's see what happens when I
bump up the Aqua move it up and then leave it oh I see it's it's coming up in
the shade a little bit so I'm going to just bring it back down to a 8 and let's
move on I'm leaving the split toning alone and now let's look at the
sharpening so this is a nice sharp photo to start with I'm going to put this up
to a 75 ish it doesn't have to be too exact and now let's reduce some of the
noise I can see the thumbnail here and it may be difficult for you to see it on
the video but a13 is doing it and now let's mask out the sky we do not want to
sharpen the sky so I'm holding on the alt and dragging and anything that's
black will not be sharpened the whites will be sharpened so I'm going to drop
it right there and that's perfect now I'm going to click the remove chromatic
aberration button also the enable profile Corrections this is where we're
adjustments are made based on the camera and lens that I was using when I shot
this panel and let's scroll down overall this is looking a little too blue for me
I'm going to go back to the top and warm it up just a little bit more using our
temperature there's 8,000 this is going to give the mountains more of a warm
look so overall I'm liking what I see so I want to apply these settings now to
the other four images and how I do that is I hold down the control button or
command on a Mac and select the other four but the photo that I actually
edited is still the one that I'm seeing on the screen and now I click on the
sync button and make sure that the settings are right I don't want any crop
to be synced I don't want spot removal sync that's good so now I click
synchronize so now all of those adjustments that we just made to the one
photo will be applied to all the other photos now I'm ready to assemble these
five images into a panel so since they're already all selected I'm going
to right click and photo merge panorama and now we let Lightroom do its thing
and it's going to create a thumbnail image there it is looking nice and there
are three options that we can choose from generally cylindrical gives the
tallest image so I'm going to leave it as it is now and I'm going to click
merge and Lightroom is now going to chew on this problem we can see the status
bar on the top left of the screen and since this is just a single row panorama
it's not going to take very long but Lightroom works very well with single
room row panoramas however it does not work well with double row or triple row
panoramas the panorama is being created I can see it in the bottom and it is
looking good so far maybe a little darker than I wanted but let's start by
cropping it because I want the island to be exactly in the middle
I like balanced images where there's an equal amount of weight on the right and
the left and this particular composition is just made for balanced images so I'm
going to pull the right side over so that the island is right in the middle
let's pull down some sky just enough actually I want the island to be the
hero of this story so since it's the hero I I don't need more sky I want this
to be really the main focal point even though in the top right I'm about to cut
off that top of the mountain there and let's bring the bottom up like that and
the right-hand side maybe just a touch just to make sure there it is and now
let's click the done button it is perhaps a little too contrasty I would
like to lighten some of it up just a little bit and to do that I'm going to
move the black point to the right because if you look at the histogram you
can see it's bunched up over on the left-hand side and let's just bring out
some of those shadows so I'm in a minus 29 to start with now let's bring it up
to minus 15 and Lightroom is chewing on this task because now we have a very big
image to deal with and if I hit the eye button on my keyboard I can see that
this image is eleven thousand five hundred and eighty pixels wide and
that's a pretty big image I could print this very large so I'm happy with that
it is looking good maybe I'll just a little lighter or we're at a minus ten
now if I want to enhance some of these trees here let's use the other secret
weapon with Lightroom and that is the brush tool and I'm just going to brush
over these trees here and the bottom of the
island for the purpose of bringing this part of the island a little more alive
just making it a little more of the focal point to draw the eye things that
are bright in a photo is what first draws the eye and what I'm battling with
in this image is that the top right of the photo the mountain that's lit by the
Sun is off to one side and although it's absolutely beautiful I don't like the
fact that this is the brightest part of the image so I'm going to click an new
brush and I'm going to try and darken that part of the mountain just a little
just to take away a little bit of that emphasis that's on the right-hand side
because again the brightest parts of your image are what draws the eye and I
don't want the eye going off to the right-hand side so I've painted the
right-hand side and now if I want to see exactly what the shape of the mask is
then if I put my mouse over this little black dot here it's going to show up in
red and you'll notice that none of the sky was painted because we had this Auto
mask button selected I'm going to go down to a - 0.59 so we just took away a
little bit of that bright sunshine and if I really want to be fancy on this
let's click a new brush again and let's try and brighten up the dark left side
I've increased the exposure to a plus 0.4 and let's just put the mouse brush
over top of this dark part of the mountain and see if we can just brighten
that up a bit in order to try and increase that balance of light between
the left side and the right side I'm pretty happy with that I'm going to also
hit this line of trees here because that is also very dark in the image and it's
specially compared with the right-hand side of the image I want to enhance some
brights here and let's also on that last one open up the shadows just a little
bit just to try and brighten that left side so that it matches the right side
just a little bit I'm going to see what it looks like as a final adjustment if I
turn up the saturation on green just a touch and in addition I'm going to turn
up the luminance on green just a little bit see if that makes a difference in
the image and it does especially on the middle of the island it brightened up
those greens and that's something that I want so there's our panorama eleven
thousand five hundred and eighty pixels wide we did that in ten minutes and this
image is ready to be hung on the wall the only thing I would do further would
be to take a closer look at the sky when I'm zoomed in just to make sure that
there aren't any dust spots that need to be cloned out using the spot removal
tool here but that's it if you enjoyed this video I'm going to ask you for a
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just for landscapes thanks so much and I'll see you in the next video