10-shot hand-held panorama from Badlands National Park, 2020
Panoramic stitching software has gotten so good, that nowadays I’m able to capture many of my pano shots hand-held. This image is a composite of 10 vertical images captured with my Nikon Z7 and 24-70mm f/4S Nikkor Z lens. I merged the images from RAW in Lightroom Classic and then adjusted the resulting raw file in both Lightroom Classic and Photoshop using Color Efex Pro 4 to enhance color and contrast. The resulting file ended up at over 250 megapixels!
This week, we are taking a look at panoramic images. Panoramas are generally images that have a uniquely wide aspect ratio. We like panoramas for their creative impact. You can capture panoramic images in a variety of ways, including cropping in-camera or in post, and by “stitching” together several images captured in sequence.
Garden of the Gods and Pikes Peak. 5-shot pano stitch (Click to enlarge)
Panoramic images are a current hot topic in the digital photography world. For the uninitiated, a panoramic image is any image that has an exaggerated aspect ratio; much longer (or taller) than it is wide. You can produce panoramic images in one of two ways:
Cropping
Stitching
While cropping can work great, you throw away image resolution when you do it. With stitching, you need to take multiple images and blend them together. Doing so gives you images with far more detail than you’d get from any single image frame. Consider a simple stitch with two shots from the 16 megapixel Nikon D7000, which produces a 4,928 x 3,262 pixel image. Simply by combining two shots end to-end, you’d get a composite image that was at most 9856 x 3262 pixels– 32MP. Continue reading Who needs a multi-row pano kit?→
