1. Preliminary preparation for panoramic stitching
What is extreme photography? Some people say shooting with drones, and some people say shooting in extreme environments, but these are difficult for us ordinary photography enthusiasts to achieve. In fact, there is another option for extreme photography, which is panoramic stitching photos.
After all, we often see very shocking natural scenery or urban scenery. A lens or a photo cannot convey this shocking feeling. Therefore, the extreme photography gameplay of panoramic stitching satisfactorily solved our problem.
In addition, after the Camera Raw of Photoshop is upgraded to version 9.6, the speed of stitching panoramic photos has been nearly doubled. We will also introduce it in detail in a later article.
● The selection of shooting equipment should not be careless
Since you want to stitch a photo with extremely high pixels, the equipment must be carefully selected. If we choose a 20-megapixel SLR camera to stitch together a 200 million or 300 million pixel photo, the processing of light material photos will waste a lot of time.
So the equipment we use is Canon’s 50-megapixel camera. Of course, a 50-megapixel camera is more expensive. You can also use a 20-megapixel or lower-pixel camera to try, but you need to take more material photos, otherwise it will be difficult to achieve the super-high-pixel stitching level.
For the lens, if you want to make stitching easier and have a low error rate, use a wide-angle lens, which is more suitable for beginners in stitching. If the stitching effect is excellent, or the stitching content is very rich, choose a lens with a focal length or a telephoto end.
● Preliminary preparation
There is not much preparatory work. The first is to choose a suitable place. If you are in a city, it is recommended that you choose a higher location, such as a high-rise building. If you are in a mountainous area, I suggest you work harder and climb a mountain. The scenery on the top of the mountain is definitely the best. In short, the scenery at the commanding heights is more suitable for splicing.
Don’t forget to bring your tripod. Using a tripod can help you take more accurate material photos. If the weather is good, and you use a wide-angle lens to shoot, you can choose to hold it, although there will be some deviation, but the problem is not big. If you use a telephoto lens to shoot, or shoot stitching material at night, then remember to use a tripod, otherwise it will be difficult to guarantee the perfect stitching of your material photos.
It’s also worth noting that because the stitching process is cumbersome, we usually take a row of material photos from left to right. In very few cases, we will take two or more rows of material photos, so we stitch together The photos will be a slender bar.
Therefore, we recommend that you use vertical shooting, so that sweeping a line of material photos can also make the vertical width of the camera a little more, and it will not appear too slender.
2. The most important part of shooting material
The most important part of stitching photos is to take material photos.
● Tripod is used here
If you want to take very successful stitched material photos, it is best to use a tripod. After you find a suitable location, you can set up a tripod, and then you can shoot.
When shooting, we need to keep the stability of the tripod and the height of the camera completely unchanged, and then turn the angle of the camera to take the material photos. The advantage of this is that the photos have a unified baseline, such as the horizon, sea level, lake surface and so on. After the baseline is unified, the subsequent stitching work will be easier and the effect will be even better. Moreover, the baseline is unified, so that the stitching screen is prevented from being cut too much when stitching, and the picture pixels after stitching will be higher.
● Pay attention to the focus point and shoot with a small aperture
When shooting spliced material photos, we need the focus point of the main camera to ensure that the focus point position does not change as much as possible when turning the camera to shoot, otherwise it is easy to cause a deviation of the virtual and the real of the picture.
In addition to the focus point, since our stitched photos must shoot large scenes, we need to use a small aperture to shoot to ensure that unnecessary blurring effects do not appear in the picture.
● Each material photo must have overlapping parts
If you want to splice pictures of hundreds of millions of pixels, you must take at least ten material photos. The connection between each material photo is very important, which is related to the success of your post-stitching.
We recommend that you keep at least a quarter of the previous one in each material photo, so that the success rate of stitching is basically 100%. If the retention is too little, it may not be able to achieve a 100% success rate in the post-recognition of Photoshop.
● Try to shoot in RAW format
RAW format mainly records various parameters at the time of shooting, without compression and in-camera processing; JPG format is a storage format that has been compressed and processed in-camera. For our stitched photos, post-processing will definitely be done, so when shooting photos stitched in RAW format, the range of post-production adjustments is wider.
After we have successfully taken the material photos, the next part will depend on our computer and Photoshop software to complete. Since the Camera Raw update more than a year ago, stitching raw panoramic photos has become a foolish step.
4. After tuning into a perfect blockbuster
After we get the RAW file after stitching, the next part is the post-production, which is also a crucial part for the photographic work. Since it is in RAW format, there is a lot of room for adjustment in the later stage. First, it can be adjusted by Camera Raw, and then can be adjusted more deeply through the filter plug-in in Photoshop. It is recommended that you download the filter plug-in of Nik Collection. Now It is already open for free use, with very rich and comprehensive functions, and very easy to use.
Of course, the significance of our stitching ultra-high-pixel photos is not just to stitch together material photos, but we can zoom in 100% to view the original image, and the details of each tree in the distance are preserved. This is a high-pixel camera. The real meaning that it brings to us is that we can see rich enough content in the same photo.
