From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

870 Camera Raw 12: Panoramas with fill edges

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

870 Camera Raw 12: Panoramas with fill edges

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland, welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now as you may know, Photoshop lets you stitch a bunch of consecutively shot photographs into a seamless panorama. In which case it's usually best to shot vertical photographs, portrait style as opposed to landscape, because that way you have more vertical image data to work with, and then pivot your body as you keep your feet stationary in order to capture each shot. Well, these days it's not just Photoshop, Lightroom and, as I'll show you today, Camera Raw let you do that too. Not the pivoting, the stitching. You put the raw photographic data in and Camera Raw delivers new and improved raw panoramic data out. The news in Camera Raw 12.0 and later is that you can now take the transparent areas around your pano, which we can see as a checkerboard pattern here, and fill them, as we're seeing here, with the help of Content Aware technology. Content Aware, once the sole possession of Photoshop, has now found its way into Camera Raw. It's like Camera Raw went in and stole a piece of Photoshop's soul. To make matters worse, Camera Raw can churn out the likes of 14 bits of data per channel, per pixel as a raw DNG file. Photoshop can't do that. I mean, just imagine how you'd feel if your plugin was starting to get better than you. But cheer up, Photoshop, Camera Raw wouldn't even work if it weren't for you, or After Effects, or Photoshop Elements. Here, let me show you exactly how it works in Bridge. All right, so here I am in Adobe Bridge and I've trained Bridge on the contents of the Ventura balcony subfolder, which contains a bunch of DNG files, which I captured with the Canon 70D by the way, using that camera's raw file format and then I converted the files to Adobe's Digital Negative standard. All right, now I'll just go ahead and press Command + A, that's going to be Control + A on the PC in order to select all of the images. Then I'll right-click on any one of the thumbnails. You can choose Open if you want to launch Camera Raw inside Photoshop or if you want to host it inside Bridge instead choose Open in Camera Raw or you have a keyboard shortcut of Command + R here on a Mac or Control + R on the PC. Now if you were to work your way through these images you'll see that they are entirely uncorrected, which is to say they are quite drab by the way. And notice even if you switch over to the Lens Corrections panel that I haven't done a darn thing. I haven't corrected for lens distortion at all. But that's not a problem, because this is all stuff Camera Raw is going to do for me automatically as soon as I merge my images into a continuous panorama. All right, so I'll just go ahead and switch back to the Basic panel. And then I'll press Command + A here on the Mac or Control + A on the PC to select all of the thumbnails in this vertical film strip, then I'll go up to this fly-out menu icon and I will chose Merge to Panorama. Now I've done this before, so it's happening very quickly in my case. If you're working along with me you're going to encounter a progress bar. And most likely by default the Projection is going to be set to Spherical. Now any time you see that warning right there, that yellow caution sign, that tells you that the work is not done. As soon as it disappears you are seeing an actual preview of the panorama. And notice that we have a little bit of a break in the waves right here. That goes away if I switch back to Cylindrical. You can try Perspective as well, but most likely you're going to get an alert message telling you that that is just not going to work out for you. And Perspective is rarely the right choice. It ends up creating kind of bow tie images, incidentally. Now notice that my Auto Crop checkbox is turned off. You can turn it on if you want and then the merge function will go ahead and automatically crop away the transparent pixels. I don't want that however, I want to be able to see those pixels. And in fact what I want to do is automatically fill them in. So I'm going to turn on this Fill Edges checkbox, which as I was saying is new to Camera Raw 12.0, and of course, moving forward. At which point we see some bad edges along with this caution icon. You just got to wait it out. Now everything is looking kind of good until you check out the details over here on the left-hand side. Notice that we have a repeated palm tree trunk, along with these bits of cement or whatever they are. And then we've got some unevenness in this balcony edge right there. And the edge of the right side balcony, especially in the upper right-hand corner, is in just absolutely tragic shape. So I'm going to turn Fill Edges off for a moment, just so you can see what happens when you increase the Boundary Warp value. And notice as I do I am filling up the four walls of the canvas, so we have less in the way of checkerboard transparency right there. Now notice the Fill Edges checkbox, it is available to me as long as the Boundary Warp value is 99 or lower. So anything up to 99. As soon as you crank it up to 100 the Fill Edges checkbox becomes dimmed and that's because there's no longer anything to fill. So I just don't want you to think the option is suddenly broken, it's just that all of the transparent pixels have totally gone away once you crank that Boundary Warp value up to 100. All right, but I'm going to try it at 50 just for the sake of demonstration here and I'll turn on that Fill Edges checkbox once again and you're going to have to wait it out for a moment. You are going to get a progress bar down in the bottom right corner of the window and you are going to have to wait a moment to see the preview update on screen. Notice however that our balcony is still in bad shape. Now I'm probably going to crop that away incidentally, because I think it's looking ugly inside this photograph, but I don't necessarily want to crop away this left-hand information where we have this kind of repeating building over here and these repeating elements at this location. And incidentally I should just tell you that by default this dialog box right here is not this ginormous, it just kind of sits here in front of the Camera Raw. Camera Raw, even though you can see it, is not however accessible in the background. So you might as well go ahead and fill the screen with the dialog box, as I've done here. All right, I ended up taking this Boundary Warp value up to 80 incidentally. At which point notice that the image is grim looking on screen and the edges are not filled, even though we have the Apply Auto Settings checkbox turned on, which just a moment ago was brightening things up, and Fill Edges is on as well. As things currently stand you need to turn Fill Edges off, at which point you can now see the effects of the Auto Settings and then you want to go ahead and turn the Fill Edges checkbox back on in order to fill those edges. And you're going to have to wait out that caution icon. Don't freak out until it disappears. All right, now at this point we're probably ready to click the Merge button, because after all, things are looking about as good as they're going to get. However, you want to know what you're doing. Now notice this little information icon right here, it's telling you that the Projection options are not editable after the merge is completed. Meaning that all of this stuff is not something you can edit after the fact. The Auto Settings are. You can go ahead and modify the raw image settings any time you like, by the way, going forward. The crop is already applied, which is why it's dimmed. So you're not going to change the crop boundary, except to crop farther inward incidentally. So I'll go ahead and click the Merge button in order to merge those images. Camera Raw is going to ask me where I want to save this file, which is going to be a raw DNG file by the way, so all is well, we'll still have access to what in this case is 14 bits of data per pixel per color channel. All right, so I'm just going to move up a folder and I really want to save over this guy that I've created in advance, but it's possible that Camera Raw is not going to let me, so I'll just go ahead and add a -2 after its name, so that we don't have any problems. And then I'll click on the Save button in order to save that image back into Camera Raw by the way. And notice all of the Auto Settings that have been applied here inside the Basic panel. At which point I could go ahead and click the open image button in order to open that image inside Photoshop. And then once it does open I'll go ahead and press Shift + F in order to fill the screen with the image and I'll zoom on in as well. And even though the image is a little less colorful than I'd like it to be, which I can fix by the way very easily inside Camera Raw, we now have a nearly seamless panorama based on our ability to merge images together and fill in the missing edges inside Camera Raw 12.0 and going forward. If you're a member of LinkedIn Learning I have a follow-up movie in which I show you how to develop your panoramic DNG composite in Camera Raw. And by that I mean color adjust and crop the pano what with its tens upon dozens of millions of pixels, far more than you captured in the first place, all the while keeping that original raw data with its high dynamic range. For those looking forward to next week, totally different topic. I'll show you how to combine the power of the Healing Brush with the Clone Source panel and the little understood, but very useful, Diffusion Value. Deke's Techniques, each and every week, keep watching.

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