Let’s look together on how I edited one of my recent photos. This time it’s this panorama of the Bratislava castle. So let’s go :)

This photo was a 4 shot panorama. I took all the shots with the help of the 17mm tilt shift lens, where I first leveled the camera, took a shot, that shifted to left and right and took another two shots, and then rotated the lens and shifted up to get the last shot.

From there I loaded all the photos into Lightroom and used the build in Photomerge function to get the panorama. I of course had to turn of Auto crop, as that would remove most of it.

It did leave the corners empty, but since those should be just the blue sky, I can correct that easily in Photoshop later. I continued by opening the shadows a bit and darkening the highlights. I also removed chromatic aberrations and played around with the perspective distortion. Lastly I cropped the photo, to have less of the foreground.

From there I continued in Photoshop. I had no need to many edits, so all I did was (layers numbered from bottom up)
1. the source from Lightroom.
2. a copy on which I cleaned the dust spots, filled in the missing sky using Content aware fill (it did not create a perfect transition, so I used the Patch tool to correct harsh transitions) and I corrected the perspective a bit more
3. added light overall contrast
4. added overall saturation, mostly to boost the color of the sky
5. noise reduction, except on the sky, to avoid color banding
6. ended up with making the castle shine a bit more with overall brightness

And that’s all I did with this photo, check out the Process category, to see all other process posts I posted on the blog before.

I had one more 360 photo from the evening I tried them out, but regrettably, taken quite close from the spot I took the other one. I planed to do more, as it was quite a nice evening, but I had a bit of an accident. While moving around, I steeped to the side, and I ended up up to my knee in a very dirty water :/ So that was the end of photoshooting for that evening. Happens :)

But here is the second 360 shot, and here you can download it for use in a VR headset (guide for Gear VR in this post).

Again, this is a pano from 4 exposures, taken with a 8mm fisheye. Please drag the view with your mouse to look around.

It’s crazy how busy this interchange right next to the Eiffel tower is. But it’s nice if you want to get some moving cars into your shots. And it worked out even better with a bus :)

This is a two exposure vertorama, with a third exposure used to remove few lens flares causes by the bus. Edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

Again it has been a while since I updated the wallpapers page with any new wallpapers, so today is the day I’m adding two new for you :) And since I like to have a theme each time I add some, the today theme is clouds :)

As always you can download them and many more from the wallpapers page here.

I love how easy it is to do panoramas with the tilt shift lens. No distortions, no need for special tripod head, no need to move the camera. Just shift to one side, that to the other, and it’s done :) I started to write a small review on the 17m TSE Canon lens, and probably will also do few guides on using a tilt shift lens, but don’t really know when. Still trying to catch up after the last trip, and another one is coming up in few days. This will be a busy year for me :)

This is a three shot panorama, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.