Hi Guys. I thought I would share with you the process i've gone through creating my Taupo Bay pano, which I have sold three 1.8m long prints of.
My original post is here : here. Photoshop crashed and lost that version, which was crap anyway, so I did it all again. I havn't posted my final version of this photo yet, because, well its not finished!
Its worth mentioning that for some reason i had shot this in Av, not M. it was also on auto white balance so every image is waay off in exposure. I had shot raw tho, so I could do my best to balance things out in RAW, before converting. I converted each of the 14 shots to a 16bit TIFF for making the pano.
You will need to view this image
for this to make sense - 56kers beware - its 500k!
So here goes.
1. Lay images in correct order. I setup a guide and use that to get the horision level and in line across all the images. Starting at one end, go along each layer with free transform and skew/ warp /stretch the images to fit.
The Red background is a solid colour fill layer, and it helps me to see where there are holes in the image.
2. Here I created brightness / contrast and hue / saturation layers for each of the layers, and masked it off for the sand. To do this properly, you need to Put each image into a group, and set the blending mode of the group to Normal, not Pass-thru. So here I have all the sand looking the right colour.
3. Using the clone stamp I've used it with a soft edged brush, and gone and removed all the edges of each individual frame. I spent alot of time here make the lines in the bushes and the grass in the foreground impossible to see. The Sky and water we can clean up later.
4. Here is the cool part. Instead of cropping down to the smallest image, im going to expand out to the largest. This gives me more scope when choosing my crop at the end. Here I've setup guides to the bottom of the top image, and the top of the bottom image, as well as straight guides down each side. This will allow me to see where the original image would have been without expanding, which again is useful when choosing the crop.
I used the clonestamp, carefully, to pull out to the edges. The Sky is easy, its all blue. The grass etc its a bit harder, and it takes time to get it looking natural. You will notice also here I've added another photo into the mix, in the top right - i missed the contor of the hill so I got a friend to take a snap of the hilltop. The sky on his day was noway near as impressive as mine, and it shows!
#5. Err, I cant see any difference in this image. LOL looks like I made a mistake. Ignore step 5!
#6. This is a long and painful process of matching the waves, to try and get them looking remotely natural. This also takes along time of careful clonestamping.
#7. Here is brigtness/contrast, hue/saturation, levels, and colour balance layers being applied.
#8. Replaced the sky with the gradient tool, and carefully masked out the hills and the clouds, the islands, the boats. This took ages! For the gradient I used the colour from the top left of the original image, i sampled a 5x5 grid with the eyedropper tool.
in the end, you get a 1.5gb PSB, around 60 layers in 20 Groups - and something that looks *very* cool hanging 1.8meters across your wall!
Photoshop books are great as references if nothing else. I have a few, all have different good ideas.
