After exiting historic Faneuil Hall with this winner HDR photo safely captured, Lori and I nom’ed on some asian-fusion noodles from Wagamama and waited for Blue Hour to set in. Blue Hour (the hour after the sun sets when the sky is a-particular-color-that-I-bet-you’ll-never-guess) is perfect for HDR photography, but I’m always a bit tense since it’s so brief. This time, I had done my homework so that my tripod was in position right as the Christmas Tree was turned on in Quincey Market. The issue I quickly realized was not timing but angle, specifically my 18-200 just wouldn’t capture the whole scene in one shot. Visually explained below, I decided to shoot a 30 frame panorama. I’m slowly ironing out an efficient workflow that starts with lens corrections in Lightroom, moves straight to tone mapping in Photomatix, then ends in Photos where I merge, blend, and edit the final HDR photo to perfection.
My thought at the time was “I’ll just edit them together in Photoshop.” Anytime you hear that voice in your head, it’s code for “Given 5+ hours, I could pull this together in Photoshop.” The next weekend I went out and bought a proper 11-16mm wide angle lens (something I should’ve done a long time ago).
Bracketed Photos for the Panorama
Each one of the six shots below represents 5 bracketed photos. That makes 30 total photos used in making this HDR panorama. Note how much the frames overlap. In this case, I was a bit excessive with the overlap, but the more similarities Photoshop can find, the more accurately it can blend the photos. I usually aim to have about 33% overlap.
Initial Panorama Stitch
Rather than use Photoshop’s Photomerge plug-in, I prefer to employ only the Edit > Auto Align. Then I mask and blend the aligned layers by hand to make sure no pesky ninjas got in and misaligned the source frames during processing.
Final Photoshop Edit
After correcting the perspective, I’m left with a tone mapped HDR panorama. From here it’s a fairly straight forward matter of editing the image as if it were a single exposure.
This is really incredible man! Thanks for walking through your process!
After staring at it for so long I see a lot wrong with it (too dark, odd warping of perspective, inconsistent color scheme, etc…) So positive feedback goes a long way. Feel free to hit me with anywhere you see room for improvement as well. I’m always looking to get better and won’t take it personally.
Cool little “tutorial”! Well done! I can see some hard work went in to this image! Very nice shot.
Thanks. Ya “tutorial” should be in quotes since it’s sort of a brief run down of my workflow. Thanks for stopping by and hope to hear from you again!
~Andrew
First off, congrats on that winning image. It’s very impressive!
This image is also quite stunning. Nice walk-thru of the process as well. I can appreciate your wonderful masking work. Love the color tones, lines and textures in this. Really, really nice.
Thanks for stopping by Jimi! Always a pleasure to connect with a fellow photographer and an HDR photographer no less. Great feedback and hope to see you around again.
~Andrew
Pretty amazing man. Like how you walked it through from start to finish. Image looks good.
Thanks for stopping by also!
Glad it helped and thanks for stopping by.
~Andrew
Nice piece Andrew. Thanks for stopping by my blog earlier!
Sure thing Eden! Glad to make the connection and I hope you enjoy my site as well.