Look wider. Shooting and stitching a panorama

Have you ever thought that photos with the standard 2:3 aspect ratio for DSLRs are so cramped, you want to look over the edge of the frame to see what is going on there?. It’s because we see a lot more, we perceive the world as a panorama. So let’s try to make these panoramas and then look beyond the edges all at once.

Full review and test drive of Niko D500

Nikon D500,

LensAF-S DX NIKKOR 16-80mm f/2.8-4E ED VR,

f/11.0, 1/100, ISO 200.

Kyrgyzstan, mountain plateau near Son-Kul Lake. Panorama of eight horizontal frames.

Once upon a time, panoramic photography was the prerogative of panoramic camera owners. Not counting the poor quality “Horizons”, which exposed two frames of 35mm film at a time, the panoramic cameras were bulky and not the cheapest, and in addition worked exclusively with fixes on medium-format film, where only 4 panoramic frames fit on a clip. Complicated business.

With the advent of digital cameras the process of assembling a panorama has become much easier. The most basic way to make a panorama is to take a normal photo and crop it to a stretched format. Not the best option – you end up with a low resolution image of the same quality. It is much more interesting to shoot several photos and then stitch them together into a real panorama.

Nikon D500,

AF-S DX NIKKOR 16-80mm f/2 lens.8-4E ED VR,

f/7.1, 1/125, ISO 200

Conorchek Canyon in Kyrgyzstan. Panorama of six horizontal frames

In the early days of digital cameras, before they had megapixel sensors, you could hear some reasonable recommendations to stitch together horizontal panoramas from vertical frames. You can get a higher resolution panorama that way, because the short vertical side of the panorama will be limited by the high vertical side of the single preset frame. But now the technology has stepped forward, the resolution of cameras including Nikon D500 is enough to stitch together panoramas from horizontal frames. Therefore, quite decent panorama can be glued from 3-4 frames. Fewer shots, easier to stitch!

Now let’s find out how and what to shoot. First of all you need to be completely clear about the subject. Choose an interesting part of the landscape and decide clearly where the beginning of the scene is and where it ends. Usually the premise “I’ll take off everything and then I’ll cut everything off” doesn’t lead to anything useful – everything seems both important and useless at the same time. Don’t forget that a panoramic photo is the same picture, just in a slightly different format. That means nobody cancelled the rules of composition and story in the panoramic frame.

How to get ready to shoot a panorama? Measure the exposure of the center frame. It’s very important that all shots for the future panorama have the same focus and exposure, so both have to be fixed. For focusing I like to use the focus mode shift lever, which on the D500, as well as on other Nikon cameras, is under the little finger of my left hand. Setting it to M mode essentially turns off autofocus and locks it in some selected position.

The best way to lock the exposure is to press the AF-ON button, which can be re-programmed. I set the button to lock the exposure until I press it again, so it becomes easier to shoot the panorama. So you don’t have to keep your finger on the button when you’re shooting. It would also be handy to turn on the virtual horizon, so shots are on the same level, rather than falling off somewhere down.

Now you can start shooting the preliminaries for your future panorama. And that’s where the enemy of all panoramic photographers awaits us – parallax. “When you see double vision” the same thing happens: the subjects change their position in relation to each other, depending on the angle of view. At the beginning of the shoot, the tree is to the right of the rock, in the middle of the process it’s behind it, and at the end it goes to the left.

The longer the focal length of the lens, the less influence of the parallax is, so you can forget about it completely when shooting with a telephoto lens. But with tripod and wide angle focusing the parallax can lead to unexpected defects in the panorama build. You can completely avoid this unpleasant effect by using special panoramic heads. But it’s a heavy and cumbersome device that’s not always convenient to bring with you outdoors.

The good news is that the algorithms of modern programs effectively recognize and fight with parallax. You just need to give them room to maneuver. That means the shorter the focal length, the more overlap you have to give between frames. When I use a telephoto lens I have a good overlap of 20-30 percent, but when I use a wide angle lens I better overlap the frames by 90 percent.

You should also keep in mind that many lenses have essential vignetting which you can get rid of by setting much bigger overlap than the focal length of the lens requires.

Nikon D500,

AF-S DX NIKKOR 16-80mm f/2 lens.8-4E ED VR,

f/8.0, 1/13, ISO 100

Panorama of five horizontal frames

You have a series of photos, so now you need to unite them into a panorama. I prefer to use Adobe Camera RAW for preprocessing. But if you are used to working in Lightroom, the techniques described above will also work for it. Open all the fragments of your future panorama. It is important to process all the frames of the panorama with the same settings. To do this, after processing one frame, select all the photos loaded in ACR, find in the upper left corner, to the right of the header Filmstrip a small icon with a stack of bars, click on it and select the option Sync Settings. In the menu that appears, check all the boxes, including Local Adjustments, and press ok.

Of course, you can select all files at once and processing of one photo will be applied to all at once, except for those local changes of Local adjustments, i.e. different kinds of individual gradients and painting by brushes. So you still have to synchronize the changes through the Sync Settings menu.

Save all files in TIFF to avoid loss of quality in post-processing. Close ACR and go to Photoshop. Select File – Automate – Photomerge. It is a built-in tool of Photoshop that has recently begun to give very good results when panoramas are glued together. Select your preset files in the menu that appears, and press ok. Choose Auto as the panorama type.

The program will make some magic with your files and you will see the ready panorama. Most likely instead of a beautiful work of art you will get a ugly duckling – a skewed image with a lot of extra space around the edges. You will be especially astonished at the results of stitching of panoramas shot at a wide angle. Look closely at the final panorama, look for inconsistencies – very often the program does not stitch wires and other straight lines correctly. You will have to fix those defects manually.

Use Free Transform to stretch the panorama where necessary and crop the excess black edges with Crop. Your panorama is ready!

Group processing of blanks for the future panorama in Adobe Camera RAW and synchronization of parameters

Load photos into Photomerge

Glue and finish the panorama with Free Transform for the following final processing

Nikon D500,

LensAF-S DX NIKKOR 16-80mm f/2.8-4E ED VR,

f/10.0, 1/1000, ISO 400

A panorama of eight vertical frames