Thank you.
I enjoy working on Panos / Focus Stacked Panos / HDR Panos on my MAC in PS & ON1. Any tips on how you achieve such great results with 200 mega pixel files? Mine require a great deal of patience.
I try to keep most images including panoramas pretty simple in terms of processing. Keeping things consistent during shooting certainly makes subsequent processing easier. My basic approach to pano shooting is:
- Shoot in manual focus
- Shoot in manual exposure with fixed ISO and don't change settings from frame to frame. If there's something very bright in one frame I'll typically meter on that prior to shooting the whole pano sequence so I don't blow out that bright highlight by metering on a frame that was darker prior to fixing the exposure settings.
- I prefer to shoot panos with a fixed white balance setting so color temperature doesn't change from frame to frame
- I don't use polarizers on panos (of course I didn't use one on this night shot) to avoid problems with polarizer changes to the sky as I pan across a very wide angle
- Try to overlap around a quarter to a third of a frame to make alignment easier. To do this, for instance when shooting the panorama from left to right I'll try to pick out a landmark feature about a quarter to a third of the way from the the right edge of the frame for each shot and then make sure that landmark feature is visible at the left of the frame for the subsequent shot.
- The pano stitching is typically easier when shot from a leveled tripod using a tripod head that supports direct panning with no change in other dimensions like tilt. I'll shoot plenty hand held but then I'll shoot wider than I think I need to allow for a lot of cropping to the final stitched image. This particular shot was shot from a tripod of course due to the long exposure time needed for a night shot but that also helped with the stitching in post.
If I get that all right so there's no change in exposure or focus from frame to frame and there's plenty of frame to frame overlap and ideally a level pan then stitching and post processing is pretty easy. If I need exposure or white balance adjustments I'll typically make adjustments to one frame from the sequence and then use the Synch Settings option in Lightroom Classic to apply those edits to all of the frames used for the pano stitch. As long as there aren't exposure, focus, color balance or DoF changes from frame to frame the frames should match pretty well.
I didn't spend a lot of time editing this particular image and it didn't take very long to stitch, do a final crop and then make quick final edits like setting a black and white point.
I also typically only shoot single row panos with the camera in vertical frame orientation. I've shot some multi-row panos but those take a bit more planning and care to get sufficient overlap both horizontally and vertically to make the image easy to stitch together in post. A gimbal mount with appropriate camera mount (e.g. nodal slide) can make multi-row panos easier to shoot.
