Lightroom Bites 009 - Creating a panorama

Hi, this is Joe Houghton, and in today's Lightroom Bite, I'm going to show you how to merge some photos into a single panorama. We went off to Newgrange last weekend, which is an amazing Neolithic settlement out in County Meath in Ireland. And you can see here a few of the images that I've taken. So I've actually gone from right to left on this one, so this is going to be on the right-hand end of the panorama, and then as I move to the left, we're going to see more and more of Newgrange come into view. Now a couple of things just to make a note of when you're shooting this kind of a sequence. I'm shooting in manual mode, so if you have a look on the right-hand side there, you can see that I'm at 1/1000th of a second at f/6.4. I'd focused on this rock in the front, so I didn't necessarily want, you know, sharp focus all the way through the scene. Newgrange is a kind of an iconic monument, so I didn't necessarily need that to be pin sharp, but f/6.4 is giving me enough depth of field that we can see it and we can see what it is. And it's also giving me a nice fast shutter speed. I'm not on a tripod, these are handheld, so one thing that I would normally do though when I am shooting, you know, a landscape panorama like this is— notice I'm shooting in portrait mode. If you shoot in portrait mode, you've got much more depth from top to bottom than you have if you shoot in landscape mode. So Shoot in portrait mode and then just allow about a third or a half overlap between each of the individual images. That gives Lightroom a lot of stuff to grab onto and match between each separate image. So then what you do is you, you click on the first image in the sequence, go to the last image in the sequence, and Shift and click so you've got them all selected. Okay, and then you've got a couple of options. The shortcut is Ctrl+M for Merge into Panorama, but if you want to go up to the menu bar and do it the long way, if you like, it's Photo, and then you come down to Photo Merge. There we are, and then we just want a normal panorama. Okay, because all the images in this sequence have the same exposure. I've not bracketed them or anything, so we're just talking about normal panorama today. And there we are. Click on it and it will now bring up the panorama dialog box. So what it's doing now is it's creating a panorama preview, so it's going to try and load in those— what was it— 9 or 10 images. And it's going to give us an initial preview of that panorama. While it's doing that, I'll just talk you through the stuff on the right-hand side here. So spherical projection would be as if you were mapped to the inside of a sphere. That's quite good for really wide or multi-row panoramas. But the one I would probably normally go for is cylindrical. And that's as if you're mapping it onto the inside of a cylinder, and that tends to be slightly better to keep verticals vertical. So we might say cylindrical, but you can try each of these, and perspective gives you another option as if it was just mapped to a flat surface. When we see the preview, what we'll probably find, given that I was hand-holding, is that there will be some gaps at the top because, you know, I'm not actually moving on a tripod and I've not got perfect lines going top and bottom. So one of the things we can do is Boundary Warp, and that will just fill in all the boundaries, and we can also fill the edges if there's any gaps as well, and that will just do, if you like, a content-aware fill. And for this particular panorama, that's probably actually going to be quite a good option. Because we've got a uniformly blue sky at the top of our different images and then we've got grass at the bottom. So those are the different settings. So we'll just wait for it to build the preview. So here's our preview, and as you can see, we've got white edges and stuff. So we can, we can either do Boundary Warp. Now watch what happens when I drag the slider, it will start to warp the corners, and if I go all the way, it'll just warp those corners so that there's no white. So that's one way of doing that. Now, that does affect the geometry of the image slightly, but another option is just to fill the edges. If we click on that, then what that will do is it will recognise all those white areas and it will just effectively do a Content-Aware Fill. for us when it actually creates that panorama. And there we see it's filled in the corners and the edges beautifully. Now I should note that I speeded up the processing of that, and that took about 90 seconds to process on my machine, whereas the boundary warp just happened, you know, as I slid the slider. So there's a bit more processing involved to do the Fill Edges, but it's a very effective technique which leaves the geometry of your image unchanged. So when you're happy with the choices that you've made, you just hit the Merge, and that will now add that to the tasks going on up in the top left-hand corner of Lightroom. And there you can see now it's starting to merge those 8 RAW files, and then it will create that panorama. And once the panorama has been created, it will appear in the Lightroom grid here and we'll be able to see it. So we'll just wait for it to finish. If you don't want to wait for it to finish, you can now go off and edit other photos and it will just continue to create that panorama in the background. Okay, so there's our panorama now appeared in Lightroom and If we have a look at one of these individual images first, you can see that that is a 4,000 by 6,000 pixel image shot on an X-T2, Fuji X-T2, with the 27mm pancake lens, which is the equivalent of about a 40mm lens. And that's another thing that I didn't mention. You know, you don't have to go out with a super wide-angle lens to get these panorama shots. You can just go out with any lens that you've got, and if you gather a sequence like this especially in portrait mode like I've done here with, you know, just a normal length lens. I mean, that's a 40mm lens. Then we combine those 8 shots and what we end up with is this shot here. If I double-click on it, we'll see it a little bit bigger now. Now that is 12,835 pixels wide by 6,271 pixels deep. So this is a big image now. But the quality that you get, I mean, you can see the detail in the rock You can see the whole of the scene, and it's a fabulous image that has been created from 8 separate images with a relatively standard lens. You don't need any fancy kit to do this kind of thing. So if we want to have a look at that image in its full glory without any interruptions, we'll do a Fn+F7 to close the left-hand panel, Fn+F8 To close the right-hand panel, and then L twice to turn the lights out, and that just puts a little grey border around the frame and we can see the image in pretty much full screen there. And I'm pretty happy with that as a panorama shot from our visit to Newgrange. So that's it for today. See you next time.