One of the issues when creating a Panorama, are the missing areas around the sides, due to how the images have to be warped to fit each other. To correct this, one needed to either cut off the areas, fill them in or try to war the image to get rid of them. With the newest update to Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW, there is now one more option, called Boundary warp.

Here I’m showing it to you in Lightroom, but it works exactly the same in Camera RAW. To be able to use it, you have to first merge a panorama in Lightroom. To do so, just select all the files of the panorama, right click one of them and choose Photo merge/Panorama, or go from the top menu Photo/Photo Merge/Panorama, or even faster, hit Ctrl+M.

Once you get the popup window, you will see the merged panorama. If you have Auto Crop on, you have to turn it off first, to be able to see the whole photo, including the missing areas. Now here you also see the Boundary warp slider. Move it to the right, to see how the photo will start warping to fill in all the missing areas. It will also try to straighten the image while doing that.

Here are three different situations, and how it worked out. I this first one, a scenery landscape, it worked out perfectly. The sky looks great and even the road was straightened perfectly.

In this second example, it was not that perfect. This is the biggest weakness of Boundary warp. If you have straight lines close to the warped borders, Boundary warp can distort and bend them. You can see it here on the right, where the bridge is just not straight. In this case, one would have to either crop this away, try to warp it back in Photoshop, or tone down boundary warp, to a lover setting, where this is not so visible. Either way, more work is needed.

In this last example, here again are straight lines close to the edge. But since the needed warp is much smaller, there is no visible distortion in the final image.

Boundary ward is a really nice addition from Adobe. It will make some quite challenging panorama corrections that much easier. And it even leave the result in RAW DNG format, which makes it even better.

I’m not sure if its due to the horrible weather, but I just feel sleepy the whole day today. So instead of the next instance of the Photography basics series, which I planed for today (but didn’t finish), here is one more shot from yesterday, taken a bit earlier, while there was still a bit of blue in the sky.

It’s crazy how these foggy shots look noisy. And I can’t even remove the noise, due to horrible color banding appearing immediately. But I don’t even think it’s really noise. I think it’s a result of the huge amount of moisture in the air, as I did use a low ISO.

Technique: Photoshop Blend, Number of exposures: 1, Camera Model: Sony a7R + Metabones MkIII Adapter, Lens: Canon 16-35mm F2.8, Focal length: 16mm, Aperture: 16, Middle exposure time: 25s, ISO: 100, Tripod used: yes, Location: 48.139544, 17.103889

The fog has returned to Bratislava after very few fog less days. Today I thought I go up to the top of the SNP bridge, but in the end, the fog was just too thick to be worth it. I would just not see anything. Actually I like to check out web-cams before I go to the city, to get an idea how the conditions are. For Bratislava I like the ones one can find here. They really can help :)

This is a single exposure edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

Technique: Photoshop Blend, Number of exposures: 1, Camera Model: Sony a7R + Metabones MkIII Adapter, Lens: Canon 16-35mm F2.8, Focal length: 16mm, Aperture: 16, Middle exposure time: 30s, ISO: 160, Tripod used: yes, Location: 48.139544, 17.103889

As almost every winter, I’m a bit low on new photos. As the weather here is just horrible, I will be editing and posting more photos that I took in the last years, or more articles. But you may have already noticed that :)

For today, I edited a photo I took in 2014 at the Neusidlersee in Austria.

Contest update

In the first 3 days of the contest, already over 50 of you submitted your version of the photo I provided. There are still two weeks to do so, so if you want to join the fun, and have a chance to win a Everyday messenger bag, just head over to the contest page to check it out :)

New 3440×1440 wallpapers

According to the page stats, every day I get visitors to the site, looking for 3440×1440 wallpapers. And as I know how hard is it to find wallpapers at that size (as I have the same resolution on my monitor) here are two more I added to the selection :) Get them from the wallpapers page.

You will also notice a little reformatting of the wallpapers page. As it was getting a bit too long, I have implemented and accordion menu, where you choose the aspect ration you want, and that part of the site is displayed for you.