Felicity
@fbailey asked, if the previous image is stitched.
Yes, it is stitched.
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How do you make a stitch?
The easiest way is with a smartphone camera.
But there are also digital compact cameras with panorama function.
I still use my Nikon.
I would like to show you how I did it:
First of all, you have to take the single pictures for the panoramic photo. For this you should imagine the later panorama: How big should it be, where does it start, where does it stop. In addition, the camera should be guided as straight as possible, so that the upper and lower edges of the individual photos match at least approximately (you can also use a tripod for this pan, but it is not necessary). It is good if you guide your camera slowly along the lower edge of the later section, without taking a picture - just try and check whether the image section fits in. Then set the camera - aperture, shutter speed, sharpness... just the usual. Attention: When making the individual pictures plan a lot of overlapping areas!
Now, the individual images must be assembled on the PC with an image editing program. In the past I used to do this "manually" with the eraser tool and the stamper tool. This is very time-consuming and the result is mostly not satisfying.
Today there is software for it, so you can work much more comfortable and the vast majority of results is convincing.
I know two possibilities (certainly there are more):
With Lightroom - there is, for example a tutorial on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qy_HDGx3nWs
The advantage of Lightroom is that this software can handle even raw files. Thus, all image information is retained. Such a panorama with many individual images you can print on paper with extremely high resolution. I already did this for a print size of 180x70cm - such pictures are tack-sharp.
Lightroom is rather expensive. A freeware program for panorama pictures is "Image Composer Editor". You can download it for free from the internet. However, this program does not process raw files. Therefore, you have to take the single photos as jpg-files or you have to convert the raw-files into jpg-files with a suitable program. A suitable freeware extractor is "RAW Extractor" - you can download it for free.
A tutorial on using "Image Composer Editor" you find at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoftW-ycDH8 .
You see in the picture above the result after the stitch and after editing. You can see in the individual pictures that the slope in the foreground is actually quite straight. A "manual" stiching" would be quite difficult here, probably impossible. In this case, the image processing program calculates the different slope gradients to a curve. That suited me well for my picture composition. This momentum leads very nicely into the picture. Even trees are joined together flawlessly, there are no detectable defects in the transitions from one frame to the next.
At 95% the results are very good. However, for some stitches I have noticed smaller and bigger flaws. Defects must be repaired manually.
The subsequent processing:
I wanted to work out the clouds particularly effectively - that's why I decided for a strong reduction of the colours. It is a sort of coloured black and white picture. I usually spend a lot of time on that. It's about nuances. I usually try in different directions. At some point I come to a decision. Mostly, in Photoshop I have several layers on top of each other and let pieces shining through. So I achieve certain gradients.
I hope this post was interesting for you.
Thank you for your kind comments!
It gives me pleasure if I can offer something interesting. There is a lot to say about what an image could be. It's nice if there's an exchange of views.