Some Panoramic's, opinions ?

W

W.Feather

[H]ard DCOTM x4 & [H]DCOTY x1
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Just getting around to making some of my pano's from last years vacation.....

Edit: sorry for the size, image shack wasnt working with the thumbnail part, probably too big

Edit 2: Forgot to add, l am fine with the images being used, just please give credit , if you would like a larger size lmk, the originals can easily fill 3: 2440x1600/1440 monitors.....ill post more up when I get home

Edit 3: Added 3 more, and changed it to just links right now, too big IMO to have em all showing on here

Opinions ?

1) http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/904/panorama2jpg.jpg

2) http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/3152/panorama1croppedtoreals.jpg

3) http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/9080/panorama3touchedupsizej.jpg

4) http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/607/panorama4changedsize576.jpg

6) http://img521.imageshack.us/img521/8141/panorama6resize.jpg


Any suggestions on how to make them better? These are just the cropped ones i'm using on my desktop, still have the PSD's and originals ofc. any advice from you photo guys will be very much appreciated
 
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I'd add a local contrast operation on 1. Unsharp mask, 12-24%, radius 170ish, threshold 0. I'd then follow it up with a small contrast curve.

On 2 I'd do a similar local contrast operation as 1, but would use an amount around 10%. Then I'd do a curves adjust where I'd drag the left and right sides in to clip the very edge of the darkest colors to black and the very edge of the brightest to white. On this same layer, I'd do a small s curve to make it a bit more globally contrasty. I'd fiddle around with bringing out the rainbow in the sky - a saturation of +50 masked around the raindbow looks nice and stands out.

I normally use Capture NX2, so I'm not sure if there is a dedicated option in Photoshop for the local contrast operation that doesn't use the Unsharp Mask filter.

Edit: These suggestions are based on the posted images.
 
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1) Queenstown, NZ
2) Auckland, NZ

Taken with a Nikon D5000

MN Scout, can you please elaborate on these techniques? I am completely clueless when it comes to photoshop
 
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Before i post more up, if i upload these to drop box, is there a way for me to embed on the forums a smaller size ?
 
upload 2 filesizes.
this is the code you use:

HTML: 
[URL="put url of large image here"][IMG]put url of thumbnail here[/IMG][/URL]
 
ahh, i guess that would work...ill have to save em as much smaller sizes later then...
 
W.Feather, I'm replying to your first two photos you posted. I'm not sure if this is what you are looking for, but it should help you learn more about photo processing - at least the way I do it.

Two things are apparent to me. 1st the haze in the sky due to the vast lasdscape and dust and humidity is causing your pictures to lack contrast on the details and look flat. 2nd the resized pictures looked a bit blurry.

The 1st issue of lacking contrast on the details can be fixed using a local contrast post processing method, which will work very well on your pictures to get rid of the haze and make details come out.

The 2nd issue with a blurry resized picture can be fixed with output sharpening. This sharpening can be accomplished a few ways.
  • Photoshop: Here is a good article again from Juza Photo on using Photoshop’s Smart Sharpen operation http://www.juzaphoto.com/article.php?l=en&article=28 This article does a great job of explaining the method of: resize to 2x desired, sharpen, resize to desired then sharpen one last time. At the very end use the “Save for Web” dialog and choose 70% and check convert to sRGB.
  • Capture NX2: I often output my resized JPGs in Capture NX2 because it is the program I do most of my processing in. With Capture NX2, I use the older Unsharp Mask sharpening method which involves resizing the image to the desired dimensions then adding an Unsharp Mask step with an Intensity of 10% and a Radius of 5%. The radius amount adjust the halo width. For web you want to stop just before a halo begins to show, and for print you want the halo around edges to show so that it’ll look nice and sharp. Most processing places do the final print sharpening for you that is ideal for their printers, so you normally wouldn’t need to worry about that. Those percentages have worked well enough for me for general photos I post up at around 800x600 to 1280x1024. Finally, choose Adjust->Color Profile, Convert to Profile, sRGB IEC61966-2.1, Inten Relative Colorimetric, check Use black point compensation. I have all these adjustments saved so it is easy to load them up or use in the batch operation.
bythom has a large “Sharpening 101” article http://www.bythom.com/sharpening.htm where he discusses some of the finer points of when you should apply certain photography operations, which color spaces you should be in and general settings. The only time I’ve found a need to be that picky was when I programmed a few image processing scripts in Java. Most of the time I’m in Capture NX2, so I have to just hope that they are doing things optimally. This is not the clearest article I’ve found on this topic, but want to put it out their incase a really picky person is reading this post of mine.

On using Photoshop, Lightroom, Capture NX2. What I’ve found is for my photography the only time I bust out Photoshop is if I need to do some heavy cloning to get rid of unwanted items out of the picture. Capture NX2 and Lightroom are just made specifically for photographers and they end up being quicker to adjust most settings. Specifically, I wish Photoshop had resize and filter layers similar to Capture NX2.

Panorama 1: Queenstown
Unsharp mask, 12-24%, radius 170ish, threshold 0.0 Small contrast curve. Crop the green branch off the left.

800KB 3395x800​

Panorama 2: Auckland

1,035KB 3621x800​

Steps - Panorama 2:

Overview of what the layers pallet looks like at the end of the steps:
wfeather_2_auckland_layers.png

  1. First selected all the layers from making the panorama and made them a smart object.
  2. The foreground of the houses I felt was to dark. I brought those out with the Shadow/Highlight dialog. Image->Adjustments->Shadow/Highlights. Shadows: Amount 30%, Tonal Width: 39%: Radius 3 px. This radius appears to do a bit of a local contrast enhancement, so I left it really low, which looked good. Highlights: all 0s.
  3. Local contrast: Filter->Sharpen->Unsharp Mask. Amount 17%, Radius 18.8 pixels, Threshold 0. This will bring some of the finer details out from this landscape photo.
  4. Now to bring out the Rainbow a bit. Layer->New Adjustment Layer->Hue/Saturation. Saturation +50. Now we need to apply the saturation to only the rainbow. Click on the white mask rectangle on the Layers pallet. Then chose the paint bucket with black paint. Then painted the layer all black. This will temporarily get rid of the saturation we just added. Then chose the paint brush with white paint and a large enough brush to cover the rainbow. Then paint the white on top of the rainbow. You should now see the rainbow standout.
  5. The top half of the picture looked a bit dark to me. A new Curves adjustment layer can fix it. Bring the top ¾ line up a bit. Drag the 25% point back down to the 45 degree line.
    wfeather_2_auckland_curves.png
  6. The picture was a bit flat looking. To fix this I wanted to make a few sections almost clip to black and to white. Add a new Levels Adjustment Layer. Drag the black triangle up to around 9, and the white triangle down to around 240. Any pixels that were at a value of 9 will now be 0 (black). You can see what parts of the picture are clipping by holding the Alt key down while you drag the triangles.
    wfeather_2_auckland_levels.png
  7. Then for saving to the web I followed the Juza Photo guide. Resized to 1600 tall, Smart Sharpenned 170% and 0.3px, Resized to 800 tall, Smart Sharpened with 71% and 0.1px. With the “Remove Lens Blur” option selected on both the Smart Sharpening dialog screens as shown in the guide.
 
Wow, quite detailed. Ill have to take more of alook at it later when i getback from class, thanks for that MN
 
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