Exposure Blended Panorama Walf-Through

[gmitchel]

I spent an evening last year running around Washington DC for some night shots.
One was a twelve shot sequence of the WWII Veterans Memorial Monument.

The panorama was three shots. I took four exposures with each to blend the
exposures and extend the dynamic range.

http://www.thelightsright.com/files/coachi...ntpanorama2.png

I use Photomatix Pro for the exposure blending and PTGui Pro for the panorama
stitching.

http://www.thelightsright.com/CoachingSession5
http://www.thelightsright.com/files/coachi...ingsession5.pdf

The walk-though demonstrates the steps and gives you my thought process as I
worked on this image.

Comments are welcome!

Cheers,

Mitch

[feppe]

I spent an evening last year running around Washington DC for some night shots.
One was a twelve shot sequence of the WWII Veterans Memorial Monument.

The panorama was three shots. I took four exposures with each to blend the
exposures and extend the dynamic range.

http://www.thelightsright.com/files/coachi...tPanorama\
Web.png

I use Photomatix Pro for the exposure blending and PTGui Pro for the panorama
stitching.

http://www.thelightsright.com/CoachingSession5
http://www.thelightsright.com/files/coachi...ingsession5.pdf

The walk-though demonstrates the steps and gives you my thought process as I
worked on this image.

Comments are welcome!

Cheers,

Mitch

That's a nice write-up! I do my stitching first in Autopano, and then blend the result in Tufuse. I haven't tried your workflow - do you see any material differences in the end-result or ease-of-use?

You mention you used the magic wand to select highlights. For that I go to the Channels tab in PS, and choose the channel with the highest contrast, and ctrl-click drag the channel to the make selection icon at the bottom of the tab (I think it was ctrl, might be alt or shift). It's a very quick way to choose highlights, and using a alt/shift/ctrl (again, don't remember) you can do the same for shadows.

BTW, the link to the image is broken. PNG format is a strange choice, and there's a lot of very ugly posterization and noise in the large image on your site - JPEG would make it look much better.

[gmitchel]

Thanks for the constructive comments.

I edited the link to fix it. I also changed it to a slightly diffeent version.

The posterization was my fault. It came from the Levels adjustment layer with Overlay blend. I dropped the Opacity to 25%. That reduced the posterization along the left wall. Same with the noise.

This version also has Lens Correction applied to improve the prespective.

There are lots of ways to make a contrast mask. This photo had such dark tones, it took only a few stabs with the Magic Wand to get a candidate selection and just a couple of brush strokes to clean it up.

Cheers,

Mitch