This is a great time to be a photographer. Quality camera equipment is more affordable and visual literacy higher than it’s ever been. That also makes it a challenging time to be a photographer: When everyone has a good camera and knows how to use it, how do you make your pictures stand out? Lately I’ve been experimenting with some multi-frame techniques in an attempt to answer this question. What they have in common is that they require the capture of multiple frames: panoramas, high dynamic range (HDR), and focus stacking. In this article, I’ll share what I’ve found.
Some subjects can’t be captured in a single frame. Standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon, you know that a single shot isn’t going to cut it. In such situations, a panorama can be an effective way to capture the grandeur of a scene—and combining multiple frames increases the pixel count of the final image, so that you can print the result at larger sizes (Figure 1).
Figure 1. This panorama of San Francisco from Twin Peaks is made from 24 individual frames. Because of its aspect ratio, it’s difficult to show onscreen. Because it has so many pixels, however, I could print it at a width of more than 10 feet. Zooming in, there’s a tremendous amount of detail captured in each frame.
Photoshop is forgiving when creating panoramas, but here are some tips for ensuring you get consistently good results.
Here’s how to create a simple panorama in Photoshop:
Figure 2. The panorama combined in Photomerge, edited in Adobe Camera Raw, and cropped in Photoshop (click for large, detailed composite image)
You can also create panoramas in Lightroom Classic with slightly different options.
Figure 3. You can’t always get what you want
Figure 4. The initial frames, the Photo Merge dialog, and the resulting panorama cropped and developed (click for large, detailed composite image)
Adobe Camera Raw offers the same options as Lightroom Classic. In Bridge select the frames, then click Open in Camera Raw. Select the frames in the Filmstrip, right-click and choose Merge to Panorama (Figure 5).
Figure 5. Creating the panorama in Adobe Camera Raw (click for large, detailed composite image)
We tend to think of panoramas as horizontal, but if your subject is vertical, there’s nothing to stop you from making a vertical panorama (Figure 6). You don’t have to tell Lightroom, Photoshop, or Adobe Camera Raw that you’re creating a vertical panorama—they’re smart enough to figure it out.
Figure 6. A vertical panorama created from 3 frames (click for large, detailed composite image) .
If you rotate the camera lens from one frame to the next, distortion is inevitable. For the Figure 7 example, I couldn’t stand further back from the subject, so I inevitably I rotated my body to capture the scene. I can embrace the distortion, loving it for what it is, or try to apply some fixes in Photoshop.
Figure 7. Here it wasn’t possible to get further back from the subject, so there’s inevitably some distortion in the panorama. Applying an Adaptive Wide Angle filter in Photoshop straightened out the foreground. For the finished result, I applied further warping and filled the empty space with Content Aware Fill (click for large, detailed composite image) .
A panorama can be a stepping stone to the finished result. You can combine a “finished” panorama with additional frames to create a better composition—which only occurred to me when I checked my camera roll. Figure 8 started out as a three-frame panorama. I then added two more frames as a separate step in Photoshop: one for the seagulls, the other to bring the lone figure closer to the camera.
Figure 8. Combining additional frames with a panorama—in this case to add the seagulls and bring the figure closer to the camera (click for large, detailed composite image)
Beyond creating high pixel density images to print at large sizes, Photomerge has some more workaday uses. For Figure 9, my lens wasn’t wide enough to capture the whole tree. Rather than step back, which would have introduced unwanted foreground objects, I shot three vertical frames, then merged them together.
Figure 9. When the subject won’t fit, use Photomerge (click for large, detailed composite image) .
Sometimes Photomerge can get you out of a tight spot—like when I inadvertently excluded a weather vane at the top of a derelict church. Thankfully, I had a frame that included that information. Even though one frame was horizontal and the other vertical, I was able to blend them together using Photomerge (Figure 10). Content Aware Fill wouldn’t fill the transparent areas either side at the top because they were too large. Instead, I filled these areas by copying the edge content to a new layer and transforming it.
Figure 10. When you forget to get everything in the frame, maybe there’s another frame from which you can borrow the content (click for large, detailed composite image).
If you use Instagram, Photomerge can help you create panoramas that you can chop into segments for a carousel Instagram post (Figure 11). Here’s how:
Figure 11. Creating an Instagram carousel (click for large, detailed composite image)
You can also use Photomerge to create an intentionally random panorama. The Collage option overlaps and repositions frames, but unlike the other options, it does not transform their perspective. If you choose not to blend the images, no layer masks are created, and you can deliberately incorporate some slightly different exposures so that the result looks like an old-time collage made up of overlapping pictures (Figure 12).
Figure 12. Because there was too much overlap for the effect I wanted, I used a clipping mask to clip each frame to a shape layer below. To give the impression that each of these frames is a vintage photo with a border, I added a layer style to each of the shape layers (click for large, detailed composite image).
Another technique that involves the use of multiple frames is HDR: high dynamic range images. The purpose of an HDR image is to capture both the brightest highlights and the deepest shadows in challenging lighting conditions, where a single exposure would favor one or the other. An HDR image is comprised of your base exposure combined with one or two frames that are overexposed and one or two frames that are underexposed—a three-exposure or a five-exposure bracket.
Here’s a typical HDR scenario: The subject is indoors, and you’re shooting through a window. With a single frame, everything outside the window will be blown out to provide enough light for the subject. But, shooting a three-frame exposure bracket—the correct exposure, underexposed, and overexposed—captures the scene (Figure 13).
The HDR result for the example didn’t look promising, but it gave me more scope for opening up shadows and recovering blown out highlights because of the additional information in the DNG file.
Figure 13. Shooting the subject as HDR lets you expose correctly for the subject and the exterior (click for large, detailed composite image)
The same HDR options are available in ACR. In Bridge, choose the three exposure brackets, then click Open in Camera Raw. Select the brackets in the Filmstrip, right-click and choose Merge to HDR (Figure 14).
Figure 14. A typical scenario for HDR: Retain the drama of the sky without making the foreground too dark (click for large, detailed composite image) .
HDR is a very pleasing technique—when it works. But ask yourself: Do I really need an HDR image? All those extra frames are going to eat up your camera card and your hard drive space, as well as take longer to process. There definitely are times when HDR will deliver the best result, but it’s possible to get carried away with the technique: When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail, and you apply the HDR approach to everything. Figure 15 is a case in point: Here’s an HDR image created from a three-exposure bracket. I shot the scene as HDR to retain the drama of the sky. But the result I get using just the underexposed frame is, in this case, as good. Camera raw files are full of data, and if you have a good camera, you can open up shadow detail without introducing too much noise and degrading the image quality.
Figure 15. I was able to open up the shadows enough so that an HDR image wasn’t necessary (click for large, detailed composite image) .
An alternative approach is to use HDR Pro in Photoshop (Figure 16). Starting in Lightroom, choose Photo > Edit In > Merge to HDR Pro in Photoshop. Change the mode to 32-bit. If there’s been movement from one frame to the next, turn on the Remove Ghosts option and select one of the frames to take the detail from. The initial result will be flat-looking, but when you choose Tone in ACR, you’ll have a data-rich file from which you can tease out shadow and highlight detail.
Figure 16. Creating an HDR Pro image in Photoshop (click for large, detailed composite image)
It’s possible to combine Photomerge and HDR to create an HDR Panorama. For each of the frames of the panorama, you’ll have an exposure bracket. For Figure 17, for example, I had a three-frame panorama with a three-frame exposure bracket for a total of nine images. In Lightroom Classic, choose Photo > Photo Merge > HDR Panorama (the same option is available in ACR). You might see a warning message: HDR brackets merged with Align Images on and Deghost off. If there’s been movement between frames and deghosting is necessary, first merge all the HDR brackets and then combine those HDR images into a panorama.
Figure 17. The HDR panorama using a Spherical Projection and cropped to a 2:1 aspect ratio (click for large, detailed composite image)
A third approach to working with multiple frames is stacking images for the purpose of increasing depth of field. Focus stacking allows you to have your image in focus from front to back, something that might not be achievable with a single frame.
To create the still life in Figure 18, I shot a frame for each item, making it the focal point. Combining them in a focus stack is simple:
Figure 18. Creating a focus-stacked still life, combining multiple frames with different focal points
Sometimes just two frames may be all you need for your focus stack. For Figure 19’s pseudo-HDR example, I exposed one frame for the rocks in the foreground, the other for the cliffs in the background. I aligned them automatically, but blended them manually. Auto-Blend didn’t work well because I had adjusted the exposure from frame to frame. This goes against the advice that I gave elsewhere, but in this case, I deliberately underexposed the cliffs to better capture their texture.
Figure 19. Sometimes you get better results blending exposures manually with the help of a gradient layer mask.
Here’s another time when Photoshop’s Auto-Blend doesn’t get it right. Figure 20’s two-frame focus stack was hand held, and there was (despite my best efforts) movement from one frame to the next.
One frame has the foreground flower in focus, the other has the background in focus. If you find yourself in a similar situation:
Figure 20. Photoshop isn’t always as smart as it likes to think it is, and you have to do some manual cleanup.
Here are a couple more suggestions for ways to combine multiple frames.
The Statistics feature in Photoshop is a great way to remove unwanted elements from a scene—so long as those elements are moving, like sightseers at a popular tourist destination or, as in Figure 21, traffic on a busy road.
Here’s a technique that I’ve become fond of. I’ve seen it referred to as the Pep Ventosa technique because it’s associated with a San Francisco photographer of that name. I’m not sure, exactly how he does it, but this is what I have found to work.
Figure 22. Create ethereal looking images by combining multiple frames shot from different angles.
If you’ve made it this far, I’m sure you have a sense that there’s tremendous scope for mixing, matching, and further developing these techniques. One final suggestion: Combining multiple frames can be processor intensive, and there will be a lot of trial and error and a few blind alleys on the way to getting results that you’re happy with. While you’re experimenting, consider working with lower resolution copies of your files to save time.
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