Most of us are use to doing Panorama shots and stitching them together with either Lightroom or Photoshop. But sometimes, depending upon where you were able to stand, or the subject of your composition, you might have some distortion on your corners.
Lightroom’s panoramic feature is extremely easy to use and gives pretty good results most of the time, but there is no way to fix resulting distortions without jumping over to Photoshop.
Here is a quick example of a vertical panorama I shot in the Zion National Park at the last stop along the Canyon Scenic Drive at the Temple of Sinawava. I took 5 images from the base of the cliff up and then used the LR photo merge function to built the vertical panorama.
Pano without Boundary Wrap
This was with the spherical selection without the boundary wrap. Using the boundary wrap to fill in the edges, provided a little additional content in the corners but not much improvement in the corner distortion.
Spherical Pan w Boundary Wrap
Note how the rocks in the upper left corner curve or barrel inward. The large tree tends to curve inward as well. Attempting a “Perspective” build in LR produced the following results. Note how elongated the entire image becomes in order to straighten out the rocks. And content is cropped to achieve this result.
Pano Perspective
But, there is a better way to straighten the image and save the content without elongating the entire image. There is a filter in Photoshop called the Adaptive Wide Angle filter and it is designed to take the distortion out of the image on these wide angle shots.
This image was rendered in LR with the boundary wrap then exported into PS and the Adaptive Wide Angle filter applied. I marked the rocks and the truck of the closest tree with guidelines to be straightened and let the filter do it’s work. You can add additional guidelines to the filter to lock in what horizontal and vertical lines the filter must make straight as it adjusts the image. Note the difference in the clouds in this image. They are still that same as the original image. They did not get pulled out of shape like those in the LR Perspective rendering above.
The Adaptive Wide Angle File. Sometimes it works well, sometimes it does not depending upon your subject. But one more tool to add to your editing toolbox!
#TerriButlerPhotography, #photography, #Photoshop
