Stitching and Merging Photos from Drayton Hall

For photographers, historic Drayton Hall in Charleston, South Carolina, is an ideal location. However, there can be challenging lighting situations. In this video, professional shooter Tony Sweet photographs a grand old room featuring a wide tonal range. You will learn how to create HDR images that capture full details in high-contrast situations.

You will also learn how to shoot a sequence of images of the large room to be stitched together as a dramatic panorama in post-production. In the editing suite, Tony will show you various retouching techniques to enhance your finished HDR and panorama images.

Using a wide-angle lens and eight different, full-stop exposures in HDR, Tony frames the wall and the window, which shows white pillars, gray sky, brown trees, and green lawn. For a second composition through a 14mm lens, he composes a 270-degree panorama of the room. He pans four overlapping photographs, seven auto-bracketed exposures for each of the four photographs in order to handle the difficult lighting.

In the editing suite, Tony discovers Photoshop’s Photomerge software is unable to stitch the four overlapping compositions together that should create the finished panorama. Why? You will learn that the 14mm lens causes the angle of each shot to change radically, and there are no common stitching points.

For the solution, Tony uses ten photographs stitched together to create a dramatic 360-degree panorama of the ornate room. Then, he works on the retouching details. With Lucis software, he adjusts for contrast and sharpness. He also makes alterations to each of the RGB colors, red, green, and blue. Because he works in layers, Tony is able to make individual opacity changes to soften the overall panorama.

Follow along with pro shooter Tony Sweet as he brings you into the complex world of panoramic photography at Drayton Hall.

See all of the videos in our Visual Artistry Course:

Visual Artistry – Course Preview
Using Long Exposure to Photograph Water
HDR Photography: Capturing a Water Scene
Close-Up Photography: Capturing the Details of Shells
Photographing Scenery with Multiple Exposures
Black and White Conversion
Capturing the Beauty of Downtown Charleston
Infrared Photography: Tips on Shooting and Editing
How to Mirror an Image Using Photoshop
How to Photomerge to Create a Panoramic Image
Creating a Digital Sandwich
Capturing Unique Shots in Drayton Cellar
Capturing HDR Images at Drayton
Capturing and Editing Infrared Images
Mirroring Images at Magnolia Garden
Photographing Charleston Gallery
This video: Stitching and Merging Photos from Drayton Hall
Assembling a Digital Sandwich at Magnolia Garden
Photographing Trees with Multiple Exposure