- Well, like all photography, post-processing,
very important, and we could talk about post-processing
for months and months.
But, right now, let's talk about a few steps
that I find important for panoramic images.
The first thing I'll look at when post-processing
a panoramic image is, the overall Exposure, the Contrast,
et cetera, and I opened up this one because I feel like,
I feel like I left it a little bit too bright.
So we can touch that up right here,
looking at Adobe Camera Raw,
but of course you can adjust these things
in any post-processing application.
So I have a few options here,
I can drag the Highlights down a little bit,
I can move the Exposure down a little bit,
just to return some of that feel of the late afternoon
or evening glow that was there at the time.
I can also adjust the Blacks and Whites,
but I don't think they're really necessary here.
I like to adjust the Vibrance typically
because I like to get extra pop in the image,
but the Saturation usually goes a little too far.
So again, these are all subjective,
but I feel like I've returned the feel of the scene
that we had when we were there.
So let's click on Open Image,
that actually opens it in Photoshop and leaves Camera Raw.
And the main thing I'll do here is,
I want to take away the nadir area,
which is the bottom where the tripod was.
Or in this case, it was a pole.
And I'm going to show a really great tool here,
it's a filter from a company called Flaming Pear,
called Flexify.
Now it is a paid plugin, but they offer really great trials
and I believe on this computer it's even in trial mode.
So when I open it up, I have it unfortunately set
to an earlier use, so while it's thinking I'll explain.
On the left side, kind of closer to the bottom,
you have the Input and Output options.
My Input is equirectangular, as you know,
the two by one image that includes the entire panorama.
And actually the Output will be equirectangular as well.
But what I can do when I'm looking at the image this way
is adjust the latitude to -90,
and there you go, it's showing us directly to the ground.
So I can edit that, so if I click OK,
it's going adjust the image the same way
as we just saw in the preview, but it does take a moment.
The main disadvantage to using Flexify
is just that it's pretty slow.
But it is sure very convenient.
Okay, now that we're looking directly down
at our tripod pole, I can just zoom in a little bit,
and use just any of the Photoshop tools,
the clone stamp would almost always be the main one.
I like to start from something with a corner,
like the intersection of these tiles.
And just clone and use that to my advantage,
cover that tripod right up.
We'll just do a really quick job here.
There are other options too, content aware,
patch tool for instance.
Depends how much time you want to spend making it look
as realistic as possible.
There we go, no one will be the wiser
that there was a pole there.
Okay, so that's an easy fix.
And now we'll use Flexify again
to return to our normal look.
Taking a moment to invoke the plugin,
it wants to apply the same settings again
that we applied before, but if I go ahead and drag it
the opposite using a latitude at 90, there we go,
we have our full panorama.
Now if I click on OK it will return our full resolution
panorama to the way we're used to looking at it.
And our nadir is now patched.
So that's a really great way to patch the nadir area
of your image, as long as you have Flexify 2
and a few minutes to do it.
From here I would typically save this image,
and I can even just save it without keeping the original
because all I've really done was some very basic changes,
and replaced that tripod area.
So I don't mind losing the version that I had before,
but I could also of course save a new version.
And from here, that image, I feel like, it's ready to go,
and I can resize it for whatever the purpose is.
And we're going to talk about how to share these online
and view them on our own computer coming up shortly.
Now we're looking at our same panorama
of the Abraham Lincoln steps,
except we've just tone mapped it with Details Enhancer.
And as I'm sure you've heard me say before,
using Details Enhancer to tone map usually means
I'm going to want to post-process later.
Now Details Enhancer is the most powerful of the methods,
but it also leaves us with an image
that's so well tone mapped that it looks a little flat.
So then it becomes necessary sometimes to bring back
some details and some color.
So in this kind of a panorama I think the sky looks
a little too gray and boring,
so let's just saturate the blues a bit,
bring back that feel.
I could saturate some of the other yellows, for example,
so it's the nice trees there.
But the most important, I think, is the contrast.
In Photoshop I would use a curve,
but that's available here in Photomatix Pro in a basic way.
So we can add contrast with some presets,
I'll choose Medium Contrast to see where that goes.
Okay, it generally looks pretty good,
except I think it's a little too dark on the inside
of the Memorial there,
I'm just gonna move it down to Mild Contrast.
I think it looks pretty good already.
We can adjust ourselves using the sliders.
Let's go ahead and leave it there for now.
So that's one way of post-processing your panorama
in a simple way, still built right into the workflow
in Photomatix Pro.
From there we just click Done and save the image.
Next, let's see what type of post-processing we can apply
to our reflecting pool panorama.
If you recall from earlier videos,
we created this panorama using largely automated processes.
So we didn't do very much subjective decision making
along the way, but we can do that here.
As you so often hear me say, so far in these videos,
many of the adjustments just depend on how you want it to go
and what your preferences are, they're very subjective.
So, with that in mind, let's look at how to spruce up
this panorama a bit.
I just have been starting with the tone curve
for a long time, so I usually go there at first,
because it's usually a pretty easy way to get really close
to where I want to be.
I'm going to reset it here so that we can go look at other
settings though, using this button.
And now we'll go back to our basic panel.
Let's use a little bit of Exposure adjustment
because it's just a bit too bright for that hour of the day.
Going to increase Vibrance, that's a great way to bring
in more color without overdoing Saturation.
Bringing down Blacks is a good way
to bring in some Contrast.
Bring the Highlights down as well.
Now I think we're reaching closer to the feel
of the evening we were there shooting.
Let's open it in Photoshop.
With the way we've processed this panorama
through these different stages,
we reach Photoshop with very little left to do.
But this is the place where we do
those very fine adjustments, for instance,
when you have more than one airplane in your shot
because maybe along the way we didn't catch it
in de-ghosting, now is the time where we just go ahead
and clone that right out.
Not that that airplane is important for our shot,
but since it's there and it's fun, let's keep it.
And this is also a time where, if appropriate,
you can remove some ugly things.
I'm just doing some basic clone stamping here,
and if it's important that you're showing this
very realistically, as exactly as it was,
this is something you wouldn't want to do.
But, these ugly lines I don't like,
so we're just gonna remove just a few of them
really quickly.
Clone stamping is one of those items that may be
the most used in Photoshop depending on what you do.
I could go on with that, but we won't spend time
clone stamping in this video.
The important thing is to avoid making adjustments
at the edges of the image.
If I made an adjustment over here on the right side,
maybe if I wanted to clone in or out a person,
if I wanted to change something as far as brightness,
I would need to make sure that it matches exactly
with the opposite side of my image.
So I'm avoiding doing any adjustments there
if at all possible.
Another thing I could do in this stage
is to remove the nadir as we've done with another image,
but we're going to talk about other ways of doing that
later so I will save the nadir, that's where the tripod is,
and we'll look at that in another application.