Playing with panoramas


As I work through the photos for my post on our Little Horse hike in Sedona I’ve been playing with panoramas.When we got to the plateau I wanted to capture the hoodoos and structure towering over us. I find that panoramas help get across the idea of the big spaces and colors in the red rocks area. But panoramas aren’t perfect.

Here is a panorama as taken using that function on my Sony SLT A65

Panorama taken from Sony SLT A65
Panorama taken from Sony SLT A65

I’m not delighted with this; rather than getting a sense of the size of the rocks I have a scrunched image.

No worries, I knew I could take a group of overlapping images and stitch them together in Photoshop. I had never done it before but I figured a little investigation on Lynda.com would help me out. Here are the images I picked to stitch – moving left to right.

PhotosForPanorama

When I pulled them into Photoshop to put them together I got a TIFF file that was over 2 GB in size! Here is a screen shot of the result; the full image was too large to include in a blog post.

Screen capture of the Photoshop-stitched panorama. It resulted in a 2.2GB TIFF file.
Screen capture of the Photoshop-stitched panorama. It resulted in a 2.2GB TIFF file.

 

You can see the curve at the top of the six individual images. You can also see that I pulled the camera down as I panned to the right; that could be a problem.

I pulled the image back into Lightroom to crop and level.

Panorama stitched together in Photoshop and cropped in Lightroom
Panorama stitched together in Photoshop and cropped in Lightroom

This is better than the camera panorama in that we can see the base of the rocks better; but it still doesn’t capture the grandeur of the real deal.

I think the panoramas work better on distance shots; we were just too close to this to get the effect I wanted.

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