Snapseed Panorama
Rocki Eibl
For whatever reason, I rarely do vertical panoramas - I guess I'm just used to more cinematic image shapes, and tend to shoot landscape rather than portrait anyway. But, once in a while, the subject matter decides for me.
As I've mentioned in the headline & caption, this was shot with 645 Pro and edited with Snapseed - which happens to be a free app, at the moment at least! Highly recommend grabbing it, while you can...
I recommend you make any post-processing image adjustments after your images have been stitched into the final panorama. If you need to make adjustments prior to stitching, be sure to apply the same adjustments to all of the images that will comprise the final panorama.
Hi yea,
I am interested in how you managed to get the image so sharp. I find doing hdr and trees a pain as the trees get a bit soft with crap detail. Is there any trick you did to achieve focus and sharpness on the trees, I know the shoot was a few years ago but can you remember what you focused on, was it infinity?
No tricks per se. In the ideal setup you would have no wind, use a steady tripod, and remote trigger. For landscapes you typically want a lot of DOF, so on a full-frame camera you would typically shoot at around F/11. On a cropped sensor shoot at F/8 or F/9. If you shoot a cropped sensor camera at F/11 or more, the image will appear soft and not as sharp. In post processing when I generate the HDR image, I usually make use of the Alignment and Ghost Reduction options (though in some cases these can make the image less sharp). The images that were combined to make the final HDR image were shot using a Nikon D700 with a 50mm f/1.4 lens. Exposure was 1/10s at f/11 and ISO 200. The focus was most likely set to infinity.
In this guide for how to edit star photos, I will go through the editing steps I use for any nightscape photo. I will use a panorama of the night sky above Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National park.
Follow the guidelines in my article about histograms, and more than half of the work is done. I strongly believe that the initial image is a lot more important than what you do to it in post production. A bad raw file cannot be saved, no matter what post processing routines you try.
One thing to remember when you take your photo: be really careful with focusing. You can change exposure, white balance or reduce noise in the image, but you will definitely not be able to fix an unsharp image in post processing.
After importing my files in Lightroom and selecting my favourites, the first thing I do is to apply lens corrections. Just by ticking a box, you will remove chromatic aberration in your image. All those ugly blue, green or purple haloes around brighter stars will vanish.
Scrolling back to the upper part of the control panel, we get to the White Balance (WB) adjustment. This is one of the most important steps in post processing your astrophotography. It can really make or break a photograph of the night sky for me.
At night, the sky is not blue unless the Moon is present or you shoot during twilight. Otherwise, the sky will have shades of green, yellow, dark grey, navy etc. The sky is definitely not purple as I see in many popular images nowadays.
When it comes to sky colour, I really think that going for a 100% natural look is the way to go. For a stock camera, when shooting from a dark place, your WB will most likely be in the range of 4000K to 4500K. If you shoot from a location where light pollution is very strong, WB might be around 3500K.
Be careful with the Tint slider. In the beginning you might be tempted to slide it a bit too much to the purple side. There was a lot of airglow present when I took the photo, so part of the sky has a vivid green tint.
If I add any clarity to my photos it will always be less than 15. Above that value, I believe that stars start looking unnatural. On the other hand, Dehaze is a tool that can enhance some details in the Milky Way. I prefer to use it for local adjustments, though, and at low values.
I never use the Saturation slider. Instead, I use selective saturation in the HSL panel. If I want to enhance colours in the whole image, I might add a very low amount of Vibrance. By low, I mean below 15.
This is probably the panel where I spend the most time when post processing star photos. As I said, I am very picky with colours and I really want my sky to look as natural as possible. If I process photos of the northern lights, I will definitely lower saturation for the greens as I find digital cameras to oversaturate them.
But how do you know where the mask is applied? Hold the Option key (Alt on a Windows computer) and slide the Masking slider. Suddenly your image turns to black and white. Sharpening will not be applied in the black area, but only in the white area.
Here I applied some Dehaze to the photo. The Dehaze slider is very useful in bringing up details in the Milky Way. But, like any other slider, use it carefully. You might be tempted to make the Milky Way very contrasty. Resist this temptation. I also added a gradient to the lower part of the image and increased exposure by 0.1.
The previous application of Dehaze turned my Milky Way a bit on the purple side, so I corrected that using the Tint slider. I also turned down shadows and blacks a little bit to have more texture in the dark clouds of the Milky Way.
Go to Filter > Other > Minimum. First, check that Preserve Roundness is selected. Set a pixel radius between 0.3 and 0.8. I would recommend sticking to 0.5. You might like a sky with even more reduced stars, but I believe that after a certain value it starts looking weird.
The McLaren 570GT supercar. The Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus. Two products at the absolute peak of technological performance. I combined the two to see how well I can shoot a road trip across Europe using just the phone.
Over 1,500 km (about 930 miles) I traversed mountain passes, hunted down elusive waterfalls and had a terrifying train journey through the heart of the mountain. I came away with a set of images that are extremely impressive for a phone.
It was amazing cruising around the Swiss Alps on these winding roads. This shot was taken from a video clip I shot by putting the phone on a Manfrotto tripod, giving a view out of the front windscreen.
I wandered down to this frozen lake to see if there was an opportunity to photograph the car here. Sadly, there were no roads I could use to get the car down, so I took this landscape shot using the panorama mode, using the rocks as foreground interest.
Despite the low light, the S9 Plus's wide aperture has still been able to capture a sharp, bright image. I shot in raw and edited the image in Snapseed, boosting contrast to emphasise the curves of the carbon fibre and changing the white balance.
I wanted to capture my hotel room, too. Here, I used the panorama mode to get a much wider angle than the phone could normally achieve. I had the phone on my tripod in portrait orientation, letting me simply push the phone in an arc to capture an even shot.
As some of the mountain passes were closed due to heavy snow, I had to drive the McLaren onto this train, which would take me through the mountain. It was terrifying -- the carriage was barely wider than the car, and the tunnel was pitch black and loud.
I drove back through the Champagne region of France, hoping for some shots of the car in front of beautiful mansions or stunning landscapes full of vines. Instead, the nearest I could get was this Moet & Chandon outbuilding. Oh well.
Not surprisingly, the obvious orientation for a landscape photo is in landscape (ie, wider than it is taller). The shapes and lines in most landscapes are horizontal and wide. Below is an example of this, where the long clouds* and mountain range stretch from side to side. A landscape orientation complements this pattern.
The lines of this scene are those of the vertical cliffs and rock striation. This shot is also about height. And the most pleasing sections of mist are in the centre, where it intermingles with the rock. So a portrait orientation accentuates the best qualities of this photo.
One last suggestion is learn how to use the panorama function on your camera. Wider and thinner than 16:9, panoramas can create some very sweeping vistas indeed, like this one from the Warrumbungles in NSW:
Note that shadows and bright light may sometimes enhance a scene. And when the light is already flat, like on an overcast day, you may want to enhance the contrast in light. So applying HDR may not always be the answer. But for me, once I bought my first good phone camera (the original Google Pixel), the quality of my Blue Mountains shots went up measurably, and mostly because of good HDR.
The scale and grandeur of a landscape are difficult to portray in photography, but are often what I most want to get across to my audience. Grand views are what give me that natural high, and I want others to gain some sense of how I felt looking at a magnificent scene. Here are a couple of things we can do to enhance a sense of scale.
Unless you recently bought a high end phone, your phone camera very likely has only a digital zoom. It achieves magnification by taking a normal photo and digitally enlarging part of it. The result is usually lacklustre: blurry and/or grainy.
Optical zoom magnifies by refocusing light entering the camera lens, and the results are far superior. The newer high end phones can do this, as can almost any dedicated camera (depending on the lens).
To cut a long story short, if you want to take photos of wildlife when hiking you need a telephoto lens. Most of your subjects will be just too far away otherwise. (Some insects might stick around for you to get close enough, and tame animals.)
Having a telephoto lens allows you to get up close and personal with wildlife, and modern cameras will help you to focus the shot too. As discussed earlier, optical, rather than digital, zoom will also preserve the size of the photo. You might still want to enlarge your subject later digitally, but at least you are starting with a good sized original.
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