The history of a panorama

Taking panoramic pictures is an interesting genre in photography and almost lead to interesting picture just because of the unusual format. But also the image processing can do a lot to the impression of the image.

First we start with a couple of pictures from the Five Boats building in Duisburg.

Since i wanted a higher resolution in the final image i decided to take an focal length of 35mm and took 3 rows with 8 pictures each. After first corrections, like applying lens profile in Lightroom the 18 RAW images were converted to 16Bit Tiff and stitched with PTGui. With panorams like this PTGui (or Hugin if you like) finds enough control points automatically and there is no need to manually interfere.

This looks pretty much ok, but a dramatique impression is missing. Taking down the exposure in Lightroom, pull the shadows up to ensure enough details in these areas and increasing the contrast we’ll get this result.

That’s an improvement , but with Lightroom we’ll rech the limits (ok we could increase the contrast even more, but this will lead into a loss of details in the shadow areas)

In my article [post id=202]HDR from one RAW[/post] i already described the devleopment to use the enormous potential of the RAW format developing from one RAW images with -2,0 and +2 EV and process these resulting images with a HDR tool like SNS-HDR Lite.

Doing this process with all images from the panorama (it’s a little bit of work, but we are hidding for a good picture) and stitch the panorama again with the HDR images we get this result:

Now that’s a lot better, more details in the clouds and the shadows are bright enough to have the reserves for further processing. Reducing the exposure again, fill up the shadow areas and increasing the contrast quite we reach the final result:

I think the whole procedure was worth it, and again i’ll find it worthy to sometimes process older images [post id=282]again[/post] or in a different way.

The 3 best shots of thsi little trip were published on my fotoblog in the article Five Boast, and there you can take a look at the above panorama in a higher resolution.

But even if don’t like the result that much, i just wanted to sho what’s possible with Lightroom and/or Photoshop and other tools. Just try such a process to get your own experience, so you can determine if it fits to another image. Just leave me your comments, i’m looking forward to it.

ciao tuxoche