Preview of Part 2

In Part 2 of this tutorial, we will transform this scene into a post-apocalyptic matte painting. Stay tuned!

Before Getting Started

Now before we get started, Alvaro Guzman made a really good tutorial about making panorama on this site about which you can find here. I highly recommend you read this prior to this tutorial as the techniques he showed, especially the first 3 steps are good and I won’t cover them here. In this tutorial, we will use an alternative way to merge the pictures together.

In addition to his very useful tutorial, I would add three additional insights about shooting of the photos.

#1 – Use an SLR camera

If you plan on making a panorama, I highly recommend you use a professional camera. Those allow you to manage shutter speed and aperture by yourself, so you can make sure they stay the same for every shot, ensuing consistency throughout the pictures, which is indispensable for a quality panorama. I also recommend you set your camera on manual focus after you took the first picture to make sure the depth of field remain the same.

#2 – Set the image quality to RAW format

Another reason I recommend using a professional camera is because they come with the option to take your photo in RAW quality. I won’t go much into details about the format (you can get more information here, but you can see it as an unprocessed film in traditional photography: it gives you greater management over your photos, which we’ll get into later in this tutorial.

#3 – Place the camera vertically

This is a really good tip when doing a horizontal panorama. Basically, every camera lens will cause a slight natural distortion in the picture. These would probably not even be noticeable on a single photo, but might become problematic when trying to stitch multiples photos together. Placing the camera in a vertical position will allow less distortion conflict since the left and right part of your picture will be less affected by the distortion. For a better understanding, you may refer on the following image.

However, I must point out that in our tutorial, this tip will not prove as helpful since we will be making a 3-row panorama in which distortion will be unavoidable.

Step 1 – Opening the images in Camera Raw

First off, lets start by opening Adobe Bridge. Locate your picture’s folder and open the “Building” folder. Select all the pictures in the folder, right-click and select “Open in Camera Raw”.

If you haven’t already, press U and O to toggle both the Shadow and Highlight Clipping Warning. You should get something like the image below.

You can see the sky is filled with red and that there are some blue areas on the buildings. This is a warning that, given these settings, the image will retain no color information except pure black and white for those area, which is usually a bad thing. Don’t worry, we will get to fix this later.

Step 2 – Camera Raw adjustments

Now I am not a Camera Raw expert, but I added the following adjustments to my image. Basically, I tried managing the Temperature and the Tint so the gray areas have a balanced amount of red, green, and blue. I used the Recover and Fill Light slider to restore some of the burned black and white area. I also gave the image a little bit of sharpening and saturation. (editor：admin)