The Sage of Shadowdale
Killcare Heights Pano
CS3 couldn't handle merging the 17 RAW exposures (ISO200, 50mm, manual, f/16, 1/15sec, portrait orientation), so I did:
- some basic tweaking of 1 image in LR2 (white balance, exposure, shadows, brightness, contrast, etc.),
- copied those settings & applied them to all 17 shots,
- went back to a single image and started despotting it (really bad - lots of lens spots),
- copied the despotting settings & applied it to all 17 images (since they were all the same),
- exported them all to 8-bit full size, hi-res jpg
- stitched them in autostitch (man, that app is so quick, easy & just about perfect)
- opened the resulting 8-bit jpg in CS3 and did some final tweaks (crop, curve, little extra saturation, high pass filter, some metadata & a border)
E voila!
Took about 15 minutes that way; previously I had been waiting for about 30 minutes for photomerge in CS3 to do it's thing and then it just crapped out right before producing a PSD file for the stitch. Sometimes low-tech is better; it's not perfect (looks like it has some barrel distortion (it doesn't, it's just how the clouds are), the horizon is probably not perfectly level (I might straighten it later), it's a bit noisy at full size (ie. 4000+px wide)) but for the small effort it took it worked out OK.
Killcare Heights Pano
CS3 couldn't handle merging the 17 RAW exposures (ISO200, 50mm, manual, f/16, 1/15sec, portrait orientation), so I did:
- some basic tweaking of 1 image in LR2 (white balance, exposure, shadows, brightness, contrast, etc.),
- copied those settings & applied them to all 17 shots,
- went back to a single image and started despotting it (really bad - lots of lens spots),
- copied the despotting settings & applied it to all 17 images (since they were all the same),
- exported them all to 8-bit full size, hi-res jpg
- stitched them in autostitch (man, that app is so quick, easy & just about perfect)
- opened the resulting 8-bit jpg in CS3 and did some final tweaks (crop, curve, little extra saturation, high pass filter, some metadata & a border)
E voila!
Took about 15 minutes that way; previously I had been waiting for about 30 minutes for photomerge in CS3 to do it's thing and then it just crapped out right before producing a PSD file for the stitch. Sometimes low-tech is better; it's not perfect (looks like it has some barrel distortion (it doesn't, it's just how the clouds are), the horizon is probably not perfectly level (I might straighten it later), it's a bit noisy at full size (ie. 4000+px wide)) but for the small effort it took it worked out OK.