HDR panorama tutorial

[TMorita]

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Apparently we're not supposed to post discussions in the image threads, so I'm moving the information here.

In this thread, I will explain how I shot this Pigeon Point Lighthouse HDR panorama.

Toshi

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[TMorita]

The steps in shooting this HDR panorama are:

1. Shoot the individual frames (marked in RED rectangles)

2. Merge the individual frames into HDR frames using Lightroom 6 or later (marked in YELLOW rectangles)

3. Merge the HDR frames into the final shot using Lightroom 6 or later (marked in GREEN rectangle)

Note: from what I have heard, later versions of Lightroom can do Steps 2 and 3 as one step.

If you look closely, you will notice I actually shot the frames right-to-left instead of left-to-right. I will explain why later.

Toshi

 

 

 

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Edited December 9, 2020 by TMorita

[TMorita]

Step 1: Shoot the individual frames

Things to know:

1. Most of the time, you want the camera orientation to be perpendicular to the panorama orientation For example, if you are shooting a horizontal panorama, you want the camera in a portrait (vertical) orientation.

2. Ensure you ware not using a circula polarizer if the sky will be visible in the scene. Using a circular polarizer in a panorama will make the sky color uneven because the polarization of the sky is dependent on the angle of view relative to the sun.

3. Try to make sure the camera is as perpendicular as possible to the direction of panning. I look at the gap between the camera mount plate and the tripod head and try to ensure they are as parallel as possible. This will minimize wasted pixels in the final panorama.

4. The camera must be in manual mode with fixed aperture/shutter speed/ISO. None of these exposure settings should be in the "auto" setting. This is to ensure all the frames are taken at the same camera settings.

5. Set the Exposure bracketing. A good default is +-1.7 for most scenes.

6. Set the lens focus distance to the hyperfocal distance. A through discussion of hyperfocal distance is beyond the scope of this tutorial, but there is a short explanation here: https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/hyperfocal-distance.htm  For the X Vario, the distance can be set on the lens directly, or on the X2 the manual focus turns on the depth-of-field indicator which makes this easier.

7. Pan across the scene and take each shot making sure that the frames overlap by at least 25% or make sure there is a strong visual component which overlaps across successive frames.

 

 

Edited December 9, 2020 by TMorita

[TMorita]

Step 2: Merge individual frames into HDR frames

1. Select the three shots which will be merged into an HDR frame

2. Right-click on one of the shot and select "Photo Merge" and then "HDR"

3. Merge the frame.

4. Repeat steps 1 through 3 until all the HDR frames are generated.

 

Toshi

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[TMorita]

Step 3A: Merge the HDR frames to the final shot

1. Select all the HDR frames

2. Right-click and select "Photo Merge" and "Panorama".

3. The computer will run for a while to generate a preview.

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[TMorita]

Step 3B: Merge HDR frames into final shot

4. The computer will generate a preview and ask you to select either spherical, cylindrical, or perspective projection.

    Spherical to me looks the most natural, and it is what I use most of the time.

    Cylindrical gives a taller final shot but can create a stretched distortion effect at the top and bottom.

    Perspective will generate a fisheye-style final image.

5. Once you have selected a projection type, click on "Merge" and the computer will generate the final panorama image.

6. You will need to crop the image after the panorama is generated to remove the white gaps around the image. This is normal.

Toshi

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Edited December 9, 2020 by TMorita

[TMorita]

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Other: Handling motion in HDR panoramas part 1

I mentioned that I shot this panorama from right-to-left instead of left-to-right.

The reason is: I wanted to ensure the ocean waves were only in the rightmost shot, and did not "span" across multiple shots.

If the waves span across multiple shots, the position of the waves will be different in the mulitple shots since the waves are moving.

This will cause a visual glitch when Lightroom tries to merge the HDR frames into a panorama.

So if the ocean waves are only in one shot, this problem is avoided.

 

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Edited December 9, 2020 by TMorita

[TMorita]

Other: Handling motion in HDR panoramas part 2

Lightroom can do an HDR merge of individual frames which have motion in them.

Lightroom notices if things in the HDR scene have moved, and will try to avoid creating motion artifacts.

it has different settings to fine tune this avoiding of motion artifacts when creating HDR frames.

So with a combination of the "compose scene so motion doesn't span frames" technique and the Lightroom HDR deghost feature, we can have HDR panoramas with motion in them, albeit with some constraints.

Toshi

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Edited December 9, 2020 by TMorita

[TMorita]

This is another shot I did recently which had motion in it.

This is 8 shot pano (4 across, 2 high, with camera in portrait orientation), but not HDR.

The waterfall was shot first as a "key frame" to avoid the motion spanning across multiple shots.

The rest of the shots were composed to overlap the key frame.

Toshi

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Edited December 9, 2020 by TMorita

[strohscw]

In addition to Your very detailed information I see one important note:

Not only manual mode for exposure time and f-stop, also set the White Balancing to a fixed mode otherwise You will get different color settings when You rotate the camera.

Or if You are shooting Raw with AWB then choose the WB of one picture You like and use the same value for all pictures used for the panorama. Otherwise you will get color differences at the seams.

My 2c.

[TMorita]

13 minutes ago, strohscw said:

In addition to Your very detailed information I see one important note:

Not only manual mode for exposure time and f-stop, also set the White Balancing to a fixed mode otherwise You will get different color settings when You rotate the camera.

Or if You are shooting Raw with AWB then choose the WB of one picture You like and use the same value for all pictures used for the panorama. Otherwise you will get color differences at the seams.

My 2c.

AWB does not affect the RAW image, because the RAW image is conceptually the image sensor output before any color modifications are done.

I'm assuming people are using RAW, because that's the right way to do HDR.

I suppose you could do HDR using JPEG files, but that would be rather pointless because JPEG uses a lossy compression algorithm (DCT).

Toshi

Edited December 9, 2020 by TMorita

[TMorita]

Here's a better explanation:

o JPEG files use a lossy compression algorithm, but they also contain only 8-bits per RGB color channel.

o RAW files usually contain the full output of the image sensor ADC. For current production APS-C, full frame, and some medium format sensors, this is 14-bits per color channel. Some medium format digital camera backs such as the Phase One IQ series using image sensors by Kodak or Dalsa output 16-bits per color channel.

So it would be meaningless to do HDR with JPEG files, because JPEG files only contain 8 bits per channel color information whereas RAW files usually contain 14-bits per color channel. The HDR would not look as good because there is significantly less color information in JPEG files.

 

Toshi

Edited December 9, 2020 by TMorita

[strohscw]

vor 12 Minuten schrieb TMorita:

Here's a better explanation:

o JPEG files use a lossy compression algorithm, but they also contain only 8-bits per RGB color channel.

o RAW files usually contain the full output of the image sensor ADC. For current production APS-C, full frame, and some medium format sensors, this is 14-bits per color channel. Some medium format digital camera backs such as the Phase One IQ series using image sensors by Kodak or Dalsa output 16-bits per color channel.

So it would be meaningless to do HDR with JPEG files, because JPEG files only contain 8 bits per channel color information whereas RAW files usually contain 14-bits per color channel. The HDR would not look as good because there is significantly less color information in JPEG files.

 

Toshi

Hallo Toshi,

as mentioned in my posting if You take raw, as everyone should,  you will see that the single pictures generated from raw to be used to make a pano will have different WB.

I always use raw for panos and I found this out when I had huge problems with a pano getting a uniform sky, then I found out that this had to do with the fact that I used AWB.
I thought that this has no influence with raws, which is true but no software works directly raws for panos it always developes psd or tiffs with the presets used in ACR. Have a look at Your used parameters in ACR and You will see that the color parameters are different from one to the other single picture. Wrong?

[andybarton]

There is a "White Balance as shot" option in LR just because of this.

I have done a lot of panoramas in  my time, and always set the White Balance to something fixed, in camera. The more consistent you keep the frames, the better the panorama will be.

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It's also a good idea to overlap the constituent frames by about 1/3, to give the software something to play with.

[strohscw]

vor 8 Minuten schrieb andybarton:

There is a "White Balance as shot" option in LR just because of this.

I have done a lot of panoramas in  my time, and always set the White Balance to something fixed, in camera. The more consistent you keep the frames, the better the panorama will be.

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It's also a good idea to overlap the constituent frames by about 1/3, to give the software something to play with.

Hallo Andy,

tell me when I am wrong, but this AsShot doesn´t make sure that the single pictures have the same color parameters, because when set the camera to AWB then each shot can have different parameters. 

For example the most right picture of the above seascape will have a different ColorPreset for the developement in ACR as the most right one. This has to do that the AWB calculates out of the color distribution within the frame which will be different in the most left frame (a lot of green and brown) then it will have in the most right frame (a lot of blue).

I do not want to patronize You it is only the lesson I had to learn to get even Panos. Whatever works for You is ok.

[andybarton]

What I am saying is that there is that function in Lr but you wouldn't use it for a pano where consistency is important.

[TMorita]

Yz

13 minutes ago, strohscw said:

Hallo Andy,

tell me when I am wrong, but this AsShot doesn´t make sure that the single pictures have the same color parameters, because when set the camera to AWB then each shot can have different parameters. 

For example the most right picture of the above seascape will have a different ColorPreset for the developement in ACR as the most right one. This has to do that the AWB calculates out of the color distribution within the frame which will be different in the most left frame (a lot of green and brown) then it will have in the most right frame (a lot of blue).

I do not want to patronize You it is only the lesson I had to learn to get even Panos. Whatever works for You is ok.

You don't get a uniform sky color across a panorama because the sky is not a uniform color across a wide field of view.

You need to stand outside on a sunny day and look at the sky color. The shade of blue changes quite drastically across a 180 degree field of view.

The white balance is used to set the the reference color for pure white. It does not change the pixel color data.

Toshi

 

[TMorita]

Left half is shot with incadescent color balance as a RAW (DNG) file.

Right half is shot with daylight color balance as a RAW (DNG) file.

You guys said "the white balance needs to be consistent across the panorama otherwise the colors will not match."

I said, "No, the white balance doesn't matter because the DNG contains raw image sensor data before the white balance is applied."

Look at the merged panorama file. Can you see a color shift between the two halves?

If you don't believe me, try it for yourself. Takes about five minutes. 

Your understanding of how DNG files work is incorrect.

Toshi

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Edited December 9, 2020 by TMorita

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[TMorita]

Here's a link to the Adobe DNG specification:

https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/products/photoshop/pdfs/dng_spec_1.4.0.0.pdf

If you look on page 37, there are two tags which specify the white balance to be used on the data: AsShotNeutral and AsShotWhiteXY. 

These tags specify the colors to be used for neutral (pure) white.

So the white balance is not applied to the pixel data in the file. It is stored separately from the pixel data in the file.

Think of it this way:

The white balance is a colored filter that is used when looking at the raw pixel data in the file.

If you change the white balance, it changes the color of the filter, but the raw pixel data in the file stays the same.

So when a panorama merge is done, the merge is done on the raw pixel data of the file without the white balance, so the white balance doesn't matter.

Toshi

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Edited December 9, 2020 by TMorita

[andybarton]

I was just sharing how I have always done it. If it makes no difference, then fair enough.

 

But one thing I do know - your ironing needs doing.