HDR Panorama Tutorial
It is an exciting time for HDR enthusiasts and HDR popularity continues to expand almost to the point of going mainstream. The HDR toolsets are fueling this surge and they evolving at a feverish pace to keep up and quench the thirst of those looking to dive into HDR photography. The first time I saw an HDR image – I thought – wow I sure wish I could afford an HDR camera! I had no idea that an entry level DSLR or even advanced point and shoot cameras like the Panasonic LX3 have the ability to create HDR images with basic auto bracketing support. It wasn’t until I stumbled on Stuck In Customs until I realized HDR was a process not a feature within a very expensive high end camera. I’ve since been exploring and experimenting with several exciting HDR toolsets and process tricks.
Over the past month, I’ve been evaluating Adobe Photoshop CS5 HDR enhancements. The pro’s and especially the Kelby Training folks have been driving a ton of hype regarding the HDR enhancements in CS5. I was a tad skeptical at first but I can now state after processing several HDRs with CS5 that I’m simply blown away with the results! The noise reduction and remove ghosting features have exceeded my expectations to the point where I’m finding myself going back into my photo archives and reprocessing some images that just wouldn’t have turned out well using Photomatix Pro 3.x due to either heavy noise or too much ghosting. I’ve also recently got my hands on Photomatix Pro 4.0 beta which has some huge improvements in noise, speed and ghosting but its still in early beta. In the meantime, I’m having a ton of fun creating some interesting HDRs with Photoshop CS5 that would either be almost impossible or at very least very difficult to process using prior HDR tools and methods.
In this tutorial, I’m going to share a neat HDR Panoramic trick that I picked up from following an awesome HDR Photog, David Wilson, who recently shared an incredible HDR panoramic of San Francisco on his Flickr stream. I’ve been having a ton of fun shooting at the Henry Ford and Greenfield Village museums over the past week. One of the main attractions is the Train Roundabout which is one of the eight remaining US Roundabouts still in service. I quickly encountered a challenge when attempting to capture the image. The Roundabout had a guard fence all the way around it. After several attempts, I couldn’t position my camera to capture the entire scene without picking up the rotten fence. I had just taken several Panoramic images at a recent baseball game so it was fresh on my mind when I suddenly remembered David’s trick to create a HDR Panorama.
I setup my camera in a position where I took two HDR bracketed series of photos with the intention of merging the two HDRs into one HDR Panorama. It was mid day and full sun so I had a huge light range to cover between the shadows and areas of direct sunlight. I used my Canon 7D HDR bracketing trick to capture 6 images (-3,-2,-1,0,1,2) for each HDR. Then I used the Photomerge utility within Photoshop CS5 to merge the two HDRs into one HDR Panorama which turned out great and I was able to capture the entire scene without an ugly fence in the foreground!
If you are not familiar with HDR or would like some additional supporting information, check out some of my other HDR tutorials: Sunset, Cityscape, Macro, Fusion.
Tools Used
- Adobe Lightroom to import and organize the images
- Adobe Photoshop to process the HDRs and merge the two into a Panorama photo
- Nik Software Color Efex Pro 3.0 plugin to enhance the photo
- Noiseware to remove unwanted noise from the final HDR image
Ok lets get started!
- In Adobe Lightroom, I started by organizing the two HDR bracketed series of images.
- Then I selected the 6 images to process the first HDR by selecting to ‘Edit In’ and ’Merge to HDR Pro in Photoshop’.
- The 6 images are merged and opened inside of Adobe Photoshop CS5 HDR Pro
- I selected my previously saved preset ‘Custom 180′ which I’ve found to produce good results for most HDRs so I typically start here and adjust.
- If I see any ghosting problems, I’ll select an alternate picture source from the 6 images shown below the HDR. This is a killer feature and HDR game changer of CS5 that sets the bar very high for ghost removal performance in HDR toolsets. Because of this feature, I can often shoot hand held HDRs and achieve tack sharp results. Now thats cool!!
- Next, I select the ‘Curve’ tab to adjust the exposure. This is another incredibly powerful tool within the CS5 HDR Pro toolset and saves a ton of time down the road by easily nailing the exposure without having to monkey around with a bunch of sliders and introducing a ton of noise.
- Once I’m happy with the HDR tuning, I select ‘Ok’ and it processes the final HDR image and opens up in Photoshop.
- CS5 HDR Pro does seem to take a little longer to process the HDR vs Photomatix but opening right up in Photoshop so I can begin editing – ultimately saves me a ton of time vs having to go back into Lighroom and select to edit in Photoshop as I would do when creating HDRs with Photomatix Pro.
- Typically I would begin editing my HDR but in this case I want to merge the two HDRs into a Panorama image before editing.
- I selected to save and close the image so I could create the 2nd HDR image.
- Back in Lightroom, I highlighted the other 6 images and selected to ‘Edit In’ > ‘Merge to HDR Pro in Photoshop’.
- Once again, the CS5 HDR Pro tool opened with the HDR image and I selected my ‘Custom 180′ preset to apply some initial tweaks.
- After I was done with the tweaks, I selected ‘OK’ to apply the final settings and open the HDR image in Photoshop.
- I then saved and closed the HDR.
- Back in Lightoom, I opened the two HDRs side by side with the ‘X|Y’ view.
- Then I selected ‘Edit In’ > Merge to Photomerge in Photoshop’ to generate the panorama image of the two HDRs.
- The Photomerge toolbox opened up and I just left the defaults and clicked ‘OK’ to generate the image.
- Doh! This resulted in less then desired results…
- I decided to close the image without saving and retry the Photomerge process.
- I went back into Lightroom and followed the same process to launch Photomerge.
- This time I selected the bottom option ‘Geometric Distortion Correct’.
- I was pleased to see the much better results!
- I decided to fix the level issue back in Lightroom so I saved and closed the image.
- In Lightroom, I selected the HDR Panorama image and navigated to the ‘Develop’ module.
- Then selected the ‘Crop and Rotation’ tool and rotated the image until the horizon was level.
- Next, I selected ‘Edit In’ > ‘Edit in Adobe Photoshop CS5′ to reopen the image in CS5.
- I selected to ‘Edit a Copy with Lightroom Adjustments’ that way I would still be able to revert back to the original should I need to in the future.
- Now for some editing fun! The Panorama resulted in some missing data in the corners of the image. I didn’t want to crop as I would have had to chop out the roundabout train track in the foreground in the image which is what I was after to preserve with the Panorama.
- New in CS5 is the ‘Content Fill’ option. I decided to give it a shot for this image by creating a new layer and selecting the top right corner with the lasso tool.
- Then I navigated to the ‘Edit’ menu and selected ‘Fill’.
- In the pop up dialog box, I left the defaults and selected ‘OK’.
- Boom! That worked great! The top right corner is now filled in perfectly.
- I followed the same process and filled in the other 3 corners.
- The top left corner once again had great results but the bottom 2 corners were not very good.
- I decided to use the ‘Clone Stamp’ tool to clean up the bottom corners which worked great.
- Now I had a good base image so it was time for some exposure tuning.
- Next, I used Nik Software Color Efect Pro 3.0 to apply a Polarizing filter.
- I repeated the same process but this time I selected to apply a ‘Graduated Neutral Density’ filter layer which helped lower the exposure of the very bright sky.
- Next I followed the same process and applied a Tonal Contrast filter layer to apply some tone-mapping which helps bring out the details of the image.
- Tone-Mapping often creates some undesired effects so I create a layer mask to make sure I’m only bringing out the details in specific areas i.e. I don’t want any tone mapping in the sky as it just doesn’t look right to me.
- The image looks much better after applying the layer mask.
- This is a critical step that many HDR togs miss which result in ‘over cooked’ HDR images.
- Next, its time to apply some sharpening adjustments to really bring out the details in the HDR.
- I created two additional layers and navigated to ‘Filter’ > ‘Other’ > ‘High Pass’
- In the High Pass options, I typically leave the Radius to 3.5 and select ‘OK’ to apply.
- Next, I convert the layer from ‘Normal’ to ‘Vivid Light’
- Then I selected to ‘Merge Down’ which collapses the two created layers.
- I didn’t want to apply sharpening to the entire image so I selected ‘Add Mask to Selection’ on the previous tone-mapping layer mask.
- I selected my High Pass payer and created a new Layer Mask which auto applied the selected mask from the tone-mapping layer.
- High Pass is typically too strong even for the areas where I want it so I reduced the opacity of the High Pass layer to 40%.
- Next, I created another layer and changed it from ‘Normal’ to ‘Soft Light.
- The ‘Soft Light’ effect produced some unwanted darkening in the shade areas so I used another layer mask to reduce the ‘Soft Light’ effect in those areas.
- I decided to apply another Nik Software Color Efex Pro filter called ‘Glamor Glow’ which provides a very nice soft effect to the sky and clouds but it also darkens much of the detail in the image.
- I created another layer mask to only apply the effect to the sky and clouds.
- Next I created another layer to fix a couple artifacts in the image such as a dust spot in the sky which was easily fixed with the ‘Patch’ tool.
- At this point I was pretty happy with the image and it was consuming a ton of memory and disk space with all of the layers so I decided to ‘Flatten’ the image.
- HDR processing always inherently creates additional noise within the image; however, it’s easily cleaned up.
- CS5 Camera Raw and Lightroom 3 both have some enhanced Noise Canceling; however, I still prefer to use Noiseware by creating a new layer and navigating to Noiseware.
- In Noiseware, I typically select ‘Stronger Color’ and leave the remaining defaults which does a great job at reducing the noise while preserving the image details.
- I use a layer mask to bring back some of the details in the areas where I don’t need a lot of noise canceling.
- This is the primary reason why I still prefer to use 3rd party noise canceling tools.
- Often HDR processing results in artifacts that remain even after apply the noise canceling layer.
- To fix the remaining artifacts created by the HDR processing, I create a new Gaussian Blur layer.
- I typically set the Gaussian radius to 5.0 and click ‘OK’ to apply.
- Then I create a layer mask and invert it (cmd+I)
- Next, I select the brush tool and set my color to ‘white’ and paint over the artifacts.
- Another issue created during the HDR processing is Chromatic Aberration which creates an undesired halo around portions of the image.
- In this image, I had some nasty halos to fix as shown here on the smoke stacks of the building.
- To fix, I created a ‘Hue / Saturation Layer’
- Then I inverted the mask and used brush tool to paint out all of the halos.
- Next, I set the ‘Master’ saturation back to ‘0′ and only reduced Saturation for ‘Cyan’ and Magenta’ which removed the halos while preserving the other colors in the image.
- I was pretty much done with the image but I decided for fun to create a new layer and apply a Topaz Adjust ‘Spicfy’ filter just to see if it resulted in anything interesting.
- ‘Spicify’ is one of those filters that can provide some surprising results so its almost always worth trying but it will also most likely create a bunch of unwanted results.
- For this image, I liked some of the details it brought out in the shaded portion of the image specifically inside the building so I used a layer mask to bring out those details while eliminated the remaining unwanted results from the filter.
- Whew! That was a lot of work but it sure was fun and this image experiment turned out to be a great way to evaluate many of the new features in CS5!
- Finally, I ‘Flattened’ the image, saved and closed.
- Back in Lightroom, I opened the image and navigated to the ‘Develop’ module to apply a few final tweaks.
- This is a critical step to nail down the final exposure settings of the image.
- I used Recovery to fix some highlight issues. Then I applied a little bit of fill light and blacks to counter the Recovery adjustments.
- Lastly, I reduced the saturation just a tad to counter some of the added saturation introduced during the HDR processing.
- Out of pure curiosity, I decided to check the ‘Enable Profile Correction’ which is a new feature in Lightroom 3 to auto fix issues specific to the lens by using either the built in or custom profiles.
- I was pleased to see the results so I left this on.
Well there you go! I hope you found this tutorial useful and hopefully some of my lessons learned will save you some time. I’m always interested to hear feedback and questions so please don’t hesitate to share your comments or contact me directly.
Have fun shooting!
-Ken Snyder
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