Panoramas, Part II

I found a better vantage point for taking basically the same panorama of the mountains—right in front of my school. Since it's significantly closer, the mountains get better detail, and I can also take enough raw material to chop of any clutter in the foreground, which is nice.





click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr


I wish I could upload a larger resolution to Flickr, but since I'm currently on a free account, they knock down all my files to a maximum of 1024 pixels wide. Even 1024x208 doesn't do this justice though. In fact, my monitor (1680x1050) doesn't do it justice. To view a panorama, I really want to do a print.

I learned that using a polarizer while taking panoramas is a big no-no. It made some pretty extreme lines between frames, even after the best blending job Photoshop would give me. What I ended up doing was selecting the mountains, copying them into a new layer on top, selecting the sky, copying into a new layer just below the mountain layer, and Gaussian blurring the crap out of the sky copy layer. That hid the lines pretty well, but also made the sky look rather fake, and erased the nice clouds I had going. I also boosted my blue in the Levels box a little too much, which partially posterized the sky. It's not really noticeable in 1024x208, but if I ever want a print, I'll be re-doing this.

So, a decent photo, but a great learning experience. When I finally do one with a final print in mind, I'll re-shoot on a similarly sunny day (or maybe a cloudy day...), and WITHOUT a polarizer. I over-edited this to get rid of the lines, and that won't do if I'm going to spend $50 on a print and a custom frame.