What you should know before watching this course

- In order to get the most out of this course, I don't expect you to know much about photography. Don't worry, I'll walk you through the essentials and chances are, it'll give you what you need to start capturing panoramic photos. Software like Photoshop and Lightroom has really gotten quite forgiving. But if you do want to learn more about these topics, don't worry, we have a complete course available here on lynda.com all about shooting panoramic photography. It'll walk you through all details from planning, equipment selection, dealing with different lighting conditions, as well as how to capture the best images in the field.

I'll give you the essentials here, and if it's enough knowledge for you to get results, great. In many cases, the types of panoramics you'll need for motion graphics or visual effects are not nearly as demanding as what a photographer might want to make a giant print. Besides that, it's a good idea to make sure you have a comfortable knowledge working with After Effects. So if this is the first course you've watched on After Effects here on lynda.com, I recommend you start with the Essential Training or some of the other courses to really fill in some of those core skills. We're going to be working with things like ChromaKing today, 3D cameras, some scripts, and all sorts of other techniques, and a filter called offset, and some things like Ray-traced 3D objects.

Now I'll show you all the things that are involved in working with these, but keep in mind that you don't have to be a deep expert. A good, basic knowledge that might come from doing the Essential Training course will give you all that you need to take this next level of deep dive. If you're a pretty experienced professional or semi-professional and those topics I mentioned sound relatively familiar to you, don't worry. Chances are you'll get what you need. Now this is a course that does combine a couple of different software packages. We're going to take a look at Lightroom, we're going to take a look at Photoshop. You really could decide to use either one.

I'll give you the pros and cons of each. And then we're going to dig into After Effects. As far as gear goes, make sure you have a camera, and that could be as simple as a smart phone, like I have here, or as elaborate as a professional quality shooting panoramic rig like this one here. But don't worry, we're going to dig in to all of these different types of workflows and give you a pretty good idea on how to put it all together. And in order to help you get the most out of this, there are some exercise files that I'd like to tell you about.