Category Archives: Image Stitching

Lickety Stitcher in Lightroom + Panoramas IN Lightroom

Published: November 15, 2017

Pointyland Redux

A conventional panorama stitched with Microsoft Image Composite Editor from 3 images.

Maybe we should start by explaining Lickety Split. Lickety Split is US English slang for fast so “Lickety Stitcher” is our contrived slang for a fast image stitcher. Image stitching is what you do to create a large image out of several smaller, overlapping images.

We’ve reported how much we like the FREE Microsoft Image Composite Editor (aka ICE) for stitching images because it is faster and more accurate than Photoshop’s Photomerge or Lightroom’s new, but sometimes anemic Photomerge. Here is a simple “quick panorama” method of creating a panorama from about 3 clicks. How? Configure Lightroom to run ICE as an export step. After creating the export step (described below) you do the following:

  1. Select photos,
  2. right click “Export -> ICE Quick Stitch”
  3. Click through the ICE Menus to Stitch, crop and Save.

Sadly, there is no Image Composite Editor for Mac computers. If someone knows of an equally easy to use, fast version for the Mac, let us know in the comments!

How To Set Up Lickety Stitcher

To use Microsoft ICE (or PT GUI, or other external tool), you create an Export setting for it. Click a photo (any photo), then “Export” and Add new settings as shown below. The only tricky part is finding the program you want Lightroom to run. In Windows it has to be the actual path, not a shortcut.

Microsoft ICE Panoramas from Lightroom

You don’t have to settle for only a “quick stitch” (which is best done with JPGs), you can also export full sized TIFF files and stitch those.  ICE can save documents in Photoshop .psd format and others. And if you have another image stitcher you really like, e.g. PT GUI, you can probably use this same trick to make that software work on demand.

What About Lightroom for Stitching?

We were happy to discover that Lightroom and Photoshop image stitching (panorama) creation has improved quite a lot since our first disasters trying to do vertoramas and panoramas. Indeed, I think we would be happy to use the new tools and skip using ICE in many circumstances. Here is how you use the Panorama creation feature of Lightroom.

First, pick your images. They should overlap by at least 1/3 from frame to frame. And you can pre-process them with noise removal and such. Highly recommend you do at least two things to images before you try to stitch them:

  • Use vignette correction appropriate for your lens.
  • Consider using Distortion correction before creating your panorama – not always necessary.

Then right click and find “Photo Merge -> Panorama”.

Lightroom did a quite respectable job. We were able to to create the image below entirely in Lightroom. We did see some problems, however:

  1. We got a message about “unable to save metadata”
  2. Lightroom insists on creating the image as a .dng file and uses the name of one of the files you picked (we’d like it to be a mash of first-through-last.
  3. Lightroom didn’t seem to be as smart as ICE in how it stitched the images. ICE joined the images without the airplane and satellite trails, or maybe it was just better at blending them out. We had to do that work by hand on the image Lightroom created. It was not difficult, though. It is not the first time we have seen ICE handle an image better than Photoshop PhotoMerge

In ICE we manually  bent the slightly arching shot back into vertical form and did manual cropping. In Lightroom we used the Boundary Warp option at the end to make the images fill the frame nicely. Here is what we got from those 11 images:

10 Image Panorama using Only Lightroom Photomerge

You can compare the above to the same images used via Microsoft ICE and finished in Photoshop.

Overarching Majesty

Stitched in ICE, Finished in Photoshop

Multi-Row Panorama

Here is a more ambitious 22 photo, multi-row panorama stitched with Microsoft ICE. There was a stitching problem due to cloud movement… maybe you’ve spotted it.

Asylum at the Sea

 

Stitching Software Alternatives to Photoshop, Lightroom and ICE

  • Hugin (FREE: mac, PC, Linux). Don’t much like this one even though it is free.
  • PTGUI (mac, PC). A little clunky, but does much more than stitching including HDR and can be automated. This is the one tool you need when you need to convince an image to stitch that just won’t do it. It can’t do miracles, but with work, it can get the job done.
  • Others… that we don’t have familiarity with, though we have heard good things about Kolor Autopano

Exploring Night Photography Lesson 5: Photo Processing

Published:  May 4, 2016
Last Update: May 10, 2016

Homework assignment: Star Trails. This was created using StarStax with 150 exposures of ISO 800, f/4, 15 seconds.

Homework assignment: Star Trails. This was created using StarStax with 270 exposures of ISO 800, f/4, 15 seconds. What are those things where the arrows are pointing, and what is the circled constellation?

Last week in lesson 4 the subject was star trails. We continue that theme this week and fill in with some material that you may have learned the hard way.

What settings?

Last week’s assignment was:

  • Weather Permitting, get at least 20 minutes worth of star trails. First determine what the best starting exposure is, then take 20 minutes worth.

I chose to take about 270, 15-second exposures at f/4, ISO 800 for my star trails using an intervalometer trick that I demonstrated in class. That nets over an hours worth of exposures. But how did I come up with those settings?  It was a little bit experience, and a little bit application of the principle taught in the very first homework: namely try and see!  But how did I decide what evening I would try to get star trails?  The weather needed to be right, so the germaine question is:

When will the weather be right for star trails?

Well, we strongly recommend weather.gov. See our article about how to use the information. Indeed, we like it so much, we even created a page with forecasts for places we often find ourselves going.

Weather, check. Settings, check. Now what?

Wait, what about the moon? We need to know when it rises and sets. A full moon washes out a lot of the night sky and makes for unpleasant star trails.  There are many places to determine what the moon situation is like, but I like to use The Photographer’s Ephemeris (either the App, or the online version).

Next we need to review the Stacker’s Checklist both to be sure we have all the gear and that we know what we are doing. Best is to run through it at home. Is it surprising that there are SO MANY steps? Sorry, but they are there to prevent you from making all the mistakes we’ve made.

In class we reviewed our homework (star trails) from the last assignment and discussed hits and misses.  Finally we got to the meat:

Photo Processing

It would be foolish to attempt to describe everything we did in class… especially since we have so many articles here describing how to photo process your shots (and webinars and recordings, too – oh my!)

But we demonstrated three things:

  1. Super simple Panorama creation using “Image Composite Editor” from Microsoft. Yep. You have to have a Windows machine to use it… but it’s free and SUPER simple and more effective than anything we’ve managed to get out of Photoshop or Lightroom.
  2. What Lightroom is good for… cataloging your images. And what it’s NOT good for: complex multi-image editing – for example star trails and image combinations.
  3. The three most powerful and useful elements of Photoshop:
    1.  Layers – This is the real meat of Photoshop together with blend modes which mathematically combine layers.
    2.  Masks – Masks allow you to change the way layers and adjustments get combined by “masking” out some of the changes.
    3.  Adjustments:  Curves – Curves are the best tool to learn since nearly everything you can do with the other tools can be done with curves… and if you get the hang of it, curves are actually easier to understand.

We also demonstrated Adobe Bridge which is a “lighter weight” version of Lightroom – one that doesn’t require any importing. And we spilled the beans that “Adobe Camera Raw” is the guts of Lightroom. And that Lightroom adjustments are really just like what you can do in Photoshop… with some of the magic, and much of the versatility – and also much of the complexity removed.

We also explained why RAW is the way to go, and why RAW is ugly (short reason: the camera does not see the way we do it just records heaps of numbers).

We did not do this in class, but we covered much of the ground:

12 Minute Star Trail using Advanced Stacker PLUS version14D from Steven Christenson on Vimeo.

 

Top Six Questions We Answered About Lightroom

  1.  If I use Lightroom to catalog and organize my images (keywords, etc) am I forever wedded to Lightroom?
    Practically, yes. We used to use Picasa and did our organizing and cataloging there…. unfortunately Picasa was discontinued and Lightroom had no way to import the data. If you stop paying for your Lightroom Cloud edition, you may be stuck as we do not know of a tool that can digest your Lightroom catalog.  SOLUTION: BUY Lightroom, don’t just subscribe. This is not so true about Photoshop, by the way, many tools can import Photoshop files.
  2. Is there anything particularly painful about Lightroom I should beware of?
    Yes. Lots! When your image library gets large, managing images is unwieldy, especially if you want to use multiple computers and multiple storage devices to hold those images.
  3. Is Lightroom good for Night Photography images?  Not particularly. Most of the power of manipulating night images is found in Photoshop (averaging, stacking, compositing). Lightroom can not composite images, for example.
  4. Is Lightroom hard to use? Yes. No. Maybe. We think it is powerful and much easier to use than Photoshop. But there is still lots of learning and ample room to do the wrong thing.
  5. Should I import everything I shoot?
    Yes… and No. The smaller the image library the easier it is to keep organized. Of course if you delete the very images you later want you will have paid a price for your anti-hoarding behavior.  We do believe it is reasonable to throw away .JPGs if you are keeping the RAW files. And those fringe images that you are likely to never use – well you are likely to never need them.
  6. Can I do everything in Photoshop that I can in Lightroom?  Yes, mostly. Photoshop has no image organization tools, but yes, you can make all the adjustments in Photoshop that you can do in Lightroom… only it will be harder to do and may be harder to apply to multiple images at once.

Oh, by the way, the official name of Lightroom is “Adobe Photoshop Lightroom” just to confuse everyone.

What Are the Top 4 Things to Know About Photoshop?

  1.  Photoshop is the lingua franca of photo editors. Nearly every other tool does not come close in the level of acceptance and use. Widespread use does not mean Photoshop is the best tool. Remember how VHS beat Beta? These days video tape is hardly even used! Photoshop has been around a long time and has a LOT of baggage. Photoshop is built to do a lot of things way beyond photo editing (scientific analysis, animation, typography to name a few). Because Photoshop has been around so long, the tooling is unnatural .  We started with Paint Shop Pro and found it much, much less confusing.
  2.  Is there an alternative to Photoshop?
    Yes, there is the free Gimp, and many others. Unfortunately as we have noted above, those tools are not as widely used so getting help with them is harder.
  3.  Do you have any suggestions on what I should learn first?
    Why yes, thanks for asking. We have a series of articles on that:  We call the series “The Most Used Image Editing Techniques” and it comes in three parts: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.  The one we used the most is the “Simple Astrophotography” Trick to reduce noise.  We also like this trick to select a foreground (it’s used in the video above) and use it a lot.

Homework Assignment

  •  Fire up Photoshop and try to duplicate this image:
Final image with replaced foreground

Final image with replaced foreground

Super big hint… all the files you need and the process to accomplish the task is described in this article: Foreground-o-Matic.

  • Use the same technique on your own image(s) to pick a more interesting foreground image from a “stack” (sequence) of images.

Feel free to comment below if you know the answers to the questions we asked in the first image above. We will reveal the answers in the next article.

Creating a Night Panorama

Asylum at the Sea

That’s it. You just found the perfect composition but there is a problem. The interesting bit does not fit with the other interesting bits.  So you sacrifice and change to a wider angle lens but that does not improve the shot. In fact, you can’t get an image wide enough or tall enough. Let’s change our frame of reference for a moment because not many people think about the ability of panoramas to connect the foreground to the heavens.

Although taking truly panoramic star circles is next to impossible within a reasonable budget, you can connect the earth with the sky with a little bit of planning and some tricks to aid in your alignment later in the process.

We are proposing a vertorama that is a “vertical panorama” to extend our photo to the ground and blend it into the star trail on top.  Our approach will be to shoot in landscape mode and tilt our camera up as we progress.   We can take a series of two or three shots but it will look odd if the star trails don’t extend into the edges of solid land (lower portions).  We also have to make sure that we don’t end the last frame too high as this leaves the star trail disconnected from the ground (lower) images.

Gear

The minimum amount of gear required is a camera a tripod and an interval timer.  However the whole process is going to get much easier if we have a method to align the “no parallax point” with the axis of rotation.  Huh? What did you just say…If you didn’t get that last sentence I suggest you read our primer articles on panoramas here and here or by following links out to other resources.

Planning a Shot

By this time I am assuming that you have read all of the prior articles on shot planning and alignment.  If not they can be found here, here, and here.  Now that we are up to date on planning and alignment we can get into the gory details. We are going to have to take some additional steps to help in the alignment in post processing.

I can get obsessive about the details but I want to do it right not get back to my computer to discover I spent 4 hours in the cold, dark night with stars and nothing interesting in the foreground.  I begin with an idea of how I want the image to look then I walk around with a compass and the local north declination adjustment to fine tune where the center of rotation will be in my final image. I set up my tripod where my chosen foreground will be in  alignment with Polaris (aka The North Star). Before I take the first photo I know where Polaris is going to appear in my frame. When I am really particular I will use a laser line to insure I have the object exactly where I want it in the photo.  I then level the tripod and assemble the pano head.  I use the pano head to determine the elevation of the north star this helps me know exactly how high the star with be in the sky.  This helps me to see where the star circle is going to be in the photo.  [Editor’s comment: If you know the angle of view of your lens you can determine the altitude of the north star by using your camera’s field of view as a measurement]. Knowing how high Polaris is in the sky will help me to determine the overlap I need to include all of the elements in the photo I want.  This all may seem like over-kill but to go home and thinking you have an image of a lifetime only to find you have a dud is not fun.

Shooting (and Bracketing)

I take a lot of photos with different settings until the blue period ends and the stars begin to appear. I make sure that I take a lot of bracketed shots that have 30% to 50%  of overlap. Having plenty for foreground images to choose from later is going to be very helpful when merging the final images.   Once I am satisfied I have enough images the next step is to lock the camera and tripod down tight to take the series of star trail photos.  If I didn’t get to my intended location in time and still want to get foreground shots it is still possible. Darkness merely means that my foreground exposures are going to have to be long, perhaps very long. Alternatively I can light the foreground with a flash light, strobe, or fire or I will let you borrow some light from my moon. 🙂

These are some of the images the top and bottom of the vertorama. I took right before the blue period ended. You can see the various bracketing and over lapping I did.

 

Post Process

I assume that you already know how to process your star shots into star trails. If you need a refresher check out Steven’s articles on star trail creation.  I like to do a few different versions of the with stars because I like to include different amounts of blue and so I have an easier time blending them in later in the stitching process.

Just some of the Star Circles I generated using different amounts of blue period photos.Combining a star circle with a foreground can be done with several different stitching engines, I prefer PTgui, however for other stitching engines the workflow is similar. Your images may be bright enough to do the whole process with Photoshop’s stitching or in Microsoft ICE engine but if you are blending in photos to get a darker sky then Photoshop might be a dud.  Also these stitching programs will not allow you to add control points to help align and warp the image to the background and let me be the first to  say the alignment and warping the foreground image is not fun or easy.

Import your Images

I like to import a lot of different bracketed images into the stitching engine just so I can have some variety to work with.  Also it will allow me the automatically find control points on overlapping images and then tell the software that the other images have zero pixel shift from that image in the bracket series.  This allows me to save time by putting control points on only the images that are dark or match the star circle image.   Thus I can align and blend the pano in one step then use Photoshop to blend in the stars.

Once imported click the align images,  did it work…if so hooray!! You now only have a small amount of clean up to do (skip down to the projection part of the article).  If not then you have to add some control points and align the images yourself.  Control points are areas on an image that match in overlapping images the software needs to know these areas to know how to warp adjacent images to stitch them together.  So lets look at how PTgui does this.  Below is a screen shot of PTgui’s control point placement feature.

Control points selected between the star circle image and the bright forground image. I pick areas in the image that have 1) sharp contrast, 2) Jagged edges and 3) don’t move.

All you have to do is open the adjacent images at the seam and then zoom in to find distinct points that match.  I like to use object with good contrast and unique shapes to help guide my cursor to a pixel accurate match.

In the image above you can see that the transition between the rock and the sky is the area of overlap.  I follow the rock edge because of the contrast between the sky and the rock but also it has bumps that are easily distinguishable between the top and the bottom photos. Once I have these set I do the same for the star trail photo see below.

Aligning the Star trail image with the photos from the blue period

I will align the star circle photo with the corresponding photo of my foreground just so I have less stitching errors and it is easier to align.  Again if the star circle is light enough then these images may automatically align.

Projection and orientation

Once all of the images have control points then I will go and see how the preview of the image looks in the panorama editor.

Looking at the stiched images in the panorama editor for the first time to see the errors in overlap and the corrections needed to correct the distortion.

You can see the top and bottom images of the vertorama are properly aligned at this point don’t worry about the blending we will handle that later in photoshop.  Two things are very off, causing distortion of the star circle 1) the projection and the vertical height of the image.  The projection is the way the images are projected on to the inside of a sphere during the alignment.  If you are interested in the types of projections  (and there are many in the image below) and how the distortion affects the overlap and warping of your image more info can be found here. I am not interested in the type or how it works in this case I am just worried about what looks right.  For most vertorama star circle images the “Rectilinear” projection often looks the best but is not always the case.

Correcting the projetion to make the photo appear flat and not as distorted at the edges.

We can quickly correct the oblong star circle by moving the top image toward the bottom. This will change the amount of space that is blank but once we crop the image those areas will not longer be visible anyway.

Changed to rectilinear and moved the whole image down. You can see I changed the vertical FOV with the slider on the right (right red arrow) I changed the projection at the top to rectilinear. and the line in the middle shows the movement of the image down.

 Outputting the files

Once you are satisfied with the preview the next step is to use the image optimizer to hone the control points to reduce the error.  It is so easy I am not even going to include a photo just click and tab and click optimize.  It will give you a rating “very good”, “good”, “not bad”, etc.  then suggest some corrections my usual experience is just accept them they more often help then harm.

The only step left is the output the files and then mask them in photoshop.  Go to the “Create Panorama” tab and preview the settings.  You can see the settings I use is to output the images as a “.psb” for use in photoshop but you can output what ever you would like.  The most important is to output into 16bit layers under the “LDR file format” or “HDR file format” settings. This is shown in the screen shot below.   Since the blending is going to  cancel out some of the stars the aligned images need to be output in seperate files so.  I will uncheck the image that represents the aligned star circle in the screen shot below this is “Image 6” the rest of the images are the aligned HDR brackets.  Then I will name the file something like “file….SC_BKGD” were file is the former file name and the “SC_BKGD” stands for “Star circle Background”.

Outputing the top and bottom layers

Once this is done stitching I output the star circle image alone.  So in this example I would un-check the boxes next to images 0-5 and only output image 6.   So once all of these images are outputted I select them and open them as layers in photo shop.  If your blending went well in PTgui then  great skip the next step and forward on to the next.  If the blending shows seams or other artifacts of stitching follow then next steps.

If the blending was bad then go back to PTgui mask out the areas the blending did not work so well if you have PTgui version 9, if not then output all of the layers and we will mask and clone in photoshop.  I picked this example specially because I had blending issues in the past so if you have blending issues you will know how to approach them.

This is my stitched Foreground and star circle images notice the two red arrows are places where the blending did not work so well

The first thing to try since the layers are aligned is the auto blend layers under the Edit menu.  Select the top and the bottom then navigate up to “Edit” and click under “auto blend layers”

 

This is the first tool I reach for when blending is the auto blend layers. Once the layers are aligned (and HDR-processed) thanks to PTgui the blending in Photoshop is usually easy.

If the auto blend function does not work it is time for some good old fashion hand blending. I will open the individual blend layers and the PTgui blended photo with blending issues.  I will use the photo with blending issues as the background and layer over the top the individual planes to blend by using a mask to gradually make the layers more transparent using a big soft brush.  I slowly make the seam fade or use the surrounding colors to add detail.  I will also use the clone stamp to replicate areas like clouds and blend them into each other.  This takes a lot of patience and practice to make some areas look “normal” but keep zooming in and out to see what affect you are having on the whole photo and local areas.

Adding the Star Circle

Once the blending the top and bottom image is finished the star circle can be added.  Since you exported it as a separate layer out of PTgui this can be brought into photoshop as a layer in the document.  Opening the photo as a layer then by changing its blend mode to lighten or screen blend mode then bright stars will out shine the dark background.  Thus adding the star circle to the finished photo was easy.  Don’t forget to mask out some of the areas were affected by the screen blend.  Say in cases of light pollution the foreground might be brighter then they should be.  Crop then your done.

Final image

This is the final image after the stars are added as a background layer and blended in using the screen blend mode.

Thanks for reading, as always comments and questions are encouraged.  If you have found this interesting please forward to your friends and follow us on Facebook. If you are interested in this topic (panoramas), night photography, shot planning, or super cool post processing techniques come and join us for a workshop.

 

Expanse of Waters – Night Vertorama

An example of using a panorama technique at night at Red Rock Canyon State Park, California. Coming soon a lot more information about night panoramas!

I created a Vertorama (vertical panorama) of the very last few shots before twilight began to overwhelm the stars. This is 3 separate images with about 4/5 overlap between each, but only the top image contains the star trail. You can see almost 3 hours worth of star trail taken here in this image.

I like the Vertorama technique here because it allows me to get the sky and the foreground in better context.

People often assume that the foreground was shot during the daylight, in fact the shortest exposure was 30 seconds and that was still at ISO 500! The very nearest components (the rocks and scrub) were taken during nautical twilight.

There was a tiny bit of moon (slender crescent) as well.