Going BIG in Landscape Photography

The Panoramic merge in Lightroom creates huge images. The result can also be stunnig, when I am able to expose consistently and let the images overlap properly. In the end of the post, there is a short guide.

 

Here are some samples:

Sejs-Svejbæk

27 images are stitched together to create this image. In full size, the image is 110Mb – 40500 pixels wide and 5500px in height . You can view it in full size HERE. When you merge Fujifilm RAW-files in Lightroom, the Film Simulations are stored in the DNG-file. Hence you can select the Film Simulation after the merging. Cool!

Hjejlen

 

This image of the old steamboat ‘Hjejlen’ i Silkeborg is made of four panoramas horisontal – 4 images each – merged vertical in Photoshop. Lightroom crops the panorama, but keeps as much as possible in the dng-file. Hence stacking the panoramas requires a crop of the images. Here Photoshop was the convenient option instead of exporting and importing tiff’s into Lightroom. The image is 11400×8000 pixels in full resolution.

 

I shot this hand held. Six images in portrait orientation are stitched together to make this image. It is not as large as the 16 image panorama, but can be made in one go in Lightroom. The result is 10800×5700 px.

New Carlsberg Brewery

The old brewery house ‘New Carlsberg Brewery’ from 1901 has been abandoned for many years. This summer it was open to public for the first time in ten years housing a photo exhibition. The image is made out of 8 images, and the final image is 5000 pixels wide and 10000 pixels high. It was made with my x100F, so the 23mm lens gave some distortion.

 

The Castle

This image was created from 16 images. I started with the main image (the center). Afterwards, I took about 16 images. If you look carefully, you can see the bride and her friends in two places in the image :D Again I merged the horisontal layers in Lightroom and the four horisontal images was stacked vertically in Photoshop. If I had time and skills in Photoshop, I think it would be easy to straighten up the house, so the distorsion is less pronounced. The result is an image of 9000×11000 pixels.

The Boat

Here five portrait-orientation images are merged into one, and postprocessed in Lightroom. When the images are merged, the film simulations from the RAW-fils are baked into the DNG, so it is easy to select the prefered filmsimulation afterwards. The result is a 9000×5000 pixel image.

 

Short guide

It is very easy to produce panoramas from RAW-files. However, you should be aware of the importance of using a consistent method at image capture time.

• You get the best result, if you use a tripod and ensure both tripod and camera are leveled correctly.
• Overlap the images by 1/3, when you turn the camera on the tripod.
• Set a fixed ISO, Shutter and f-stop – otherwise the camera may expose differently from image to image. Use a well-balanced direction for calibrating your settings with the light meter. Not in direction of the sun, nor in the darkest area.

After import into Lightroom, you select the images, you want to stitch into a Panorama, right clicks and selects the option ‘Photo Merge>’ and ‘Panorama…’

Depending on the focal length of the lens and the distance, I toggle between the ‘Spherical’ and ‘Perspective’-method in the Panorama-window.

After the merge, Lightroom saves a DNG-file with postfix ‘Pano’ in the same folder as the original RAW-files. In the ‘Imported Collection’, the DNG-file pops up in the end of the collection.

The merged file has the film simulations available, so you can choose Acros, Classic Chrome and other Fujifilm Film simulations in the Development Module. I often go with Velvia or Provia for Landscape.

Finally the merge operation might have turned your image slightly. In the Development module, that is fixed with the ‘Crop&Straighten’ tool. Depending on how much you need to rotate the image, you can select more or less of the merged image. After that, you can do post processing as usual.