- Applying "Looks" Using Creative Profiles
- Virtual Copies- The "No Risk" Way to Experiment
- Using Presets for One-Click Looks
- Creating Your Own Presets
- Creating Presets That Automatically Adapt to Your Image's ISO
- Other Places to Apply Presets
- Changing Individual Colors
- How to Add Edge Darkening (Vignette) Effects
- The "Gritty City" Look
- Creating a Matte Look
- Making Great Duotones
- Creating Black- and-White Images
- Sun Flare Effect
- Painting Beams of Light
- Making Streets Look Wet
- Quick and Easy Spotlight Effect
- Adding a Light to the Background
- Getting the "Orange and Teal" Look
- Creating Panoramas
- Creating HDR Images
- Creating HDR Panos
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Creating HDR Panos
If you want to create a panoramic image, but you also want it to have the same expanded total range of an HDR, you are clearly an overachiever. Be that as it may, if you’re willing to do what it requires in-camera (which is to set up your camera to shoot in Exposure Bracketing mode and take at least three bracketed shots for each frame of your pano, so you wind up with a bunch of photos, like you see here below), then the Lightroom part is really a breeze.
Step One:
Here are the images—each frame of a four-frame panorama taken with Exposure Bracketing turned on in my camera, for a total of 12 images. So, essentially, you shoot a bracketed exposure shot (that’s three images), and then move your camera over a bit (keeping in mind to overlap this second frame by at least 20% with the previous frame), and then take another series of bracketed exposures, and so on, until you reach the end of your pano. Yeah, it’s kind of a pain, which is why I don’t do it very often, but then, I’m an underachiever. Well, maybe a neutral achiever. Either way, it’s kind of a pain. But, I digress.
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Step Two:
Select all 12 images (or however many you have), and then go under the Photo menu, under Photo Merge, and choose HDR Panorama (as shown here).
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Step Three:
This brings up the HDR Panorama Merge Preview dialog, which is pretty much...okay, identical to the regular Panorama Merge Preview dialog, with the same options and all. On this particular image, I tried the Fill Edges feature for filling in those white gaps and I was amazed at how well it did filling in those areas—really just pretty jaw-dropping. I also tried the Boundary Warp slider and it looked okay, but not nearly as good as Fill Edges, so I went with that one.
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Step Four:
When you’re done, click the Merge button, and now you have an HDR panorama, and it’s even a RAW DNG image, which is great (the final HDR pano is shown below as a stacked thumbnail. That’s why there’s a “13” in the top-left corner—that represents the 12 images that made up the pano, and the pano itself). Now, if you’re thinking, “But Scott, I had some ghosting in my HDR image, and there are no deghosting controls in this dialog?” This is true, and if you have ghosting (something that moved in your image while you were taking the pano), you’ll have to go “old school” and skip this “one-stop HDR pano shop,” and instead, do it all manually. First, combine each set of bracketed exposures into single HDR images, then select them (in this case, you’d select four HDR images), go under the Photo menu, under Photo Merge, choose Panorama, and it’ll stitch all those HDRs together into a pano. The result will look the same as what you see here—it’ll just take a little bit more doing on your part. Or, you can use the Merge to HDR Panorama command, and then take a trip over to Photoshop for some clever masking or cloning or some other Photoshop wizardry.
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