Lesson Info
11. HDR Panoramas in Lightroom
Lessons
Class Introduction
04:44 2Bracketing
10:31 3How to Set-up Bracketing
02:54 4Tools to Capture HDR Better
02:09 5Scenes for Good HDR
07:49 6Process Images in Lightroom® & Photoshop
10:52 7Hyper HDR Style with Photomatix
11:39 8Post Processing in Lightroom®
07:56Lesson Info
HDR Panoramas in Lightroom
So here's the problem that you used to run in before. The problem that you ran into before, let's, do you want to talk about the concept of panoramics. So panoramics, what would happen is, if you wanted to do well, actually here, let's do this. Let's take this picture, all right, this the brightest picture, I'm gonna hold on that key, and then I'm gonna come over here and I'm gonna take this picture. I'm gonna hold on this key. And then I'm gonna right click on this, I'm gonna go to photo perge, and I'm gonna go to panorama. And, there's the panorama. So that panorama is kinda cool. So this is a place called Jade Mountain, I think I told you guys about that, all right. Awesome, three walls, the fourth wall you're just looking at sky. It's so cool. So, I'm in love with the place. I don't go to the place, I'm just in love with it. But, I think it looks great, right? But look, a lot of blown out stuff here and here, not good. So we've run into a problem. The problem we had in the chat whe...
n we were talking about it was what do you do when you're trying to be able to do an HDR and you're trying to do a panorama? Do you create all of the panoramas first, like in this case if you look back, I have, if I'm not mistaken, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine images together, for the most part, right? So if you have nine images you have one metered exposure and you have four stops under, three stops under, two stops under, one stop under, and then you have plus one, plus two, plus three, plus four. Well, you're minus fours are like that. How's Photoshop gonna be able to know how to be able to merge any of these? There's not enough detail for it to be able to know how to be able to stick them all together. So, a lot of the times what used to happen is you would have to then create individual sections of merges. Create the resulting file, and then take the resulting files and make them into a panorama. I believe that's kind of the genesis of the question that was in the chat. Like, how do you manage the panoramas? Do you stitch the exposures and then HDR? Or do you HDR and then stitch the exposures? So, it was a pain in the butt. It was a big pain in the butt. But recently one of the things that I thought was awesome is that Lightroom now created something called HDR panoramas. So inside of here, I can just grab the whole thing, right click, photo merge, HDR panorama. And it's just gonna do the merging and the stitching and the panorama and working on all of that stuff, and it will push all of that stuff together and give you the resulting file. Now, the downside to this is that you don't have the option to apply Saturday Garage in our C preset. But, Photomatix just finished coming out with their own version of an HDR panoramic thing that you could also do. While this is working I'm gonna show you that real quick. Oh no, I can't 'cause it's busy working. Now I'm stuck, there's nothing I can do here. I didn't make it in editless mode, I could have made it in editless mode and I did not. But that's a lot of information that we're throwing at it. And like, I mean, that's like 27 files, 28 files? Does anybody have any questions while we're doing that? In terms of the setting for handheld or tripod, can the setting for handheld or tripod compensate for the movement of the subject? As an example, a camera on a tripod photographing a landscape, but the branches of the trees are still moving gently? No. So if you're hand, so if you are handholding and you have branches of a tree that are moving? I would use both. I would still use the alignment and use de-ghosting. So, you're gonna have problems with both of those things, right? Because what's gonna happen is if you're handholding, you're movement from one point to another point is a camera alignment problem. There could be some fixed areas in a subject that are not moving around like your trees. The mountains probably aren't gonna move around too too much. You're gonna want to align for that, but it's gonna also exacerbate the ghosting that you have so you may as well use both options and have both options to try to be able to counteract that. That will make it a lot better for you. Now, this is done, right? And what I'm gonna do here is notice that you have, it's a really dark picture, right? But if I do an autosettings, you can see there's a lot of information in there. Panoramas also have this thing called boundary warp, which will allow you to be able to click and you can unfurl the corners and create a full image. Once I do this and I click on merge, the beautiful part about this is that this is still a DNG file, it is a hella huge DNG file, but it is a DNG file. 10 stops of data, you can move it, you can tint it, you can tone it, and we can do all of the same things that we were just doing previously. While its working on that, I'm not going to do it but I'm going to show you. I have all these files right here, I'm going to right click, there's an export. Notice that inside of here under the export, Photomatix now has an HDR batch. So if you did want to do Saturday Morning Garage preset from Photomatix, you could do that against all of these files. I don't look at Photomatix and there's other programs that are out there like Luminar and all of these other things, I don't look at any of these programs as one is better than another, I tend to look at those other ones kinda like guitars. There are Gibson guitars that sound one way, there are Les Paul guitars that sound a different way, you know there's Fenders that sound another way, there's different sounds so different programs make things look differently, their sounds. And it's just the question of just which one do you prefer and, once you have that stuff, how do you use that to then make the very best image that you can. If you want to follow any of the stuff that I'm doing, by all means please come and visit at AboutRC.com. You can find me on Instagram, Twitter, everything is just AboutRC.
Ratings and Reviews
Liz Farrell
It truly doesn't matter if this instructor creates work that looks different from what I like to make. What I got from this course were skills I needed to try something new. (In my case, I watched this before doing some interior photography, knowing I would need to use HDR in Lightroom.) RC teaches you how to set the camera up for bracketing and how HDR software works (in Lightroom, Photoshop, etc.) Apply your own creative aesthetic once you nail down these basics and you'll thank him, too.
Wayne
Just what I was looking for. Basics of what HDR is and the basic steps to do it. I do not care yet about making it realistic or not. I can get into advanced features later, but I am strongly leaning towards non-natural, more impressionistic, looks.