Tag:bracketed shots

How To Create A HDR Panorama

Panorama’s and HDR’s are my two big loves of photography. Yes, I know; we have all seen poorly done HDR (High Digital Resolution) where they almost hurt your eyes. But done right – an HDR is a fabulous image that encompasses highlights and shadows without the clarity slider running amok. I usually call them bracketed shots now when talking to people, as HDR got such a bad name at the height of its use. However, I always do bracketed shots for sunset and sunrise – and when I wanted to create a panorama of sunrise on the Walls of China at Mungo National Park recently – I made the HDR pano below. While the process may be a tad lengthy, it’s easy to do.

Shooting the Image
  1. Place your camera on a tripod in a vertical orientation and ensure that the tripod and the camera are level.
  2. Most modern DSLR’s and mirrorless cameras have built-in hdr settings where they automatically take 3, 5 or 7 shots (your choosing). If your camera doesn’t do this, you will need to change the exposure manually each time. Starting at the left of your image, take three shots. Shot #1 is correctly exposed, #2 is one stop underexposed, and #3 is one stop overexposed
  3. Move your camera to the right, allowing a 30% overlap with the first lot of images. Take another three shots as you did in step 2
  4. Repeat step 3 until you have taken all the images required, left to right, to create your panorama. In the above image, I had six vertical image sets (3 to each set, so a total of 18 images)
Editing your shot

The first step in my editing was to turn each set of three images into an HDR. To do this, I opened up each set, one set at a time, in Photomatix (click the link to download the free trial). You can do an HDR in LR or Photoshop, but I find that too basic and much prefer Photomatix. There is also Aurora, which I have, but again I find Photomatix superior. It works as a plug-in to LR but not PS, so I use it as a standalone, then save the HDR images before reopening them again to create the panorama.

photomatix interface How To Create A HDR Panorama
Open Photomatix
step one Create A HDR Panorama
Drag in your first set of three images and click on merge options
step two How To Create A HDR Panorama
Choose your options and click merge to HDR

The preset option allows you to choose between handheld or tripod. I didn’t tick options to remove ghosts as I was on a tripod. You would need to do this if your images were handheld. I also tick the reduce noise on underexposed images only.

apply filters How To Create A HDR Panorama
First combined hdr image.

The next screen opens up and shows your first completed HDR. The dust spots on the lens you can see here I removed later in PS. I don’t do much here, apart from applying a filter you see in the thumbnails to the right. I chose Balanced. If you tweak, remember to use the same tweaks on each image of your panorama. Click Finish, and it will apply your filter settings.

How To Create A HDR Panorama
Final Image

Now, click on ‘save final image’, then close it, and repeat the above with all the remaining sets of bracketed shots in your panorama.

Creating the Panorama

I first tried PS to create the panorama, but again it was too basic. It didn’t come out straight and didn’t give me the control I wanted. So I opened up the ICE (Image Composite Editor) by Microsoft. It’s a free standalone program that works MUCH better than Photoshop. If you have a MAC and are looking for a free one, you could try Hugin Panorama Stitcher

create a panorama
ICE interface

Open up ICE and click on ‘new panorama from images’. From here, it’s a simple 1 to 4 step process.

How To Create A HDR Panorama
Individual HDR images read to merge.

With your individual images open and ready, click on 2STITCH

From here, all I needed to do was

stitch pano
ICE is working its magic
How To Create A HDR Panorama
Pano Stitched

If you find your pano has a slight bow in it – place your cursor over the centre point, and you can drag the centre up or down a fraction to level it out. Then, when you are happy with it, click Next.

crop and export
Completed Stitching
Crop

In the crop section, you can choose ‘Auto Crop’, and it will crop to within the confines of the image, excluding all the black edges, or ‘no crop’, where it saves it just as it is. I chose this option as I didn’t want to lose any sky. From here, click ‘next’ or 4Export. It will take you to the same screen.

save image Create A HDR Panorama
Finished and ready to save

Once your pano is completed, save by clicking on ‘export to disk’ and save to your desired location. To finish off – open in your favourite editing program, e.g. LR or PS, crop to your desired size and save. There is no need to keep your ICE project. I opened mine in Photoshop, cropped in at the sides and bottom – and used content-aware to fill in the sky before tidying up my dust spots. (they were on the lens, not the sensor). I removed the photographer to the right with the spot healing brush, brought the vibrance up to warm the sand a fraction, then sharpened the dunes a tad.

open in photoshop

And that’s it! You’re done. I hope you found this helpful and you find ICE useful. I would love to see the HDR panorama you create.

© Bevlea Ross