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Gidday,

Still processing all of my panorama's from my trip to the UK in March last year.

This is a 27 image hand held panorama of Corfe Castle ( well the view from it, over looking the town on Corfe ). As usual it was a rushed session with wife and 7 month old standing next to me. The settings were all wrong, Auto WB and auto exposure. Stupid me.

I have already processed the 27 images in 2 batches:
1) Processed for the gound
2) Processed for the sky
3) Then masked them together.

Unfortunaley the sky is still over exposed in the middle of the image. The over exposed cloud also shows some banding which I can fix with the clone tool to smooth out. I'm wondering what I should do regarding the sky. Should I Photoshop in a totally new sky and clouds or leave it how it is?

I know if I was to print this image I wouldn't be happy with the sky, but I'm not sure on how to fix it.


Note: Click on image for larger version (416KB)

Cheers

Dont know how to help you, but the image is great. Hope you get it printed!

wow, 27 images for a panorama... really really impressive effort. I just had a look at the larger version of the photo. There are two dark grass stripes on the right of the photo. I think these need to be fixed and everything else is pretty much perfect there.

I highlighted the areas that were mentioned above:

If you had enough patience, processor power and a matching sky, you could replace it after masking it out. It would be a killer job though.. I would recommend putting it to the post processing wizzes at dpreview.com fgorums- retouch forum for a second opinion...

Lights rays is another idea but I am obsessed with light rays these days so that's a kinda biased view.

"Here is a cheap 15 minute attempt!

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2043/2311644069_8dd60ed984_b.jpg

Thanks for the replies.

:Raskill
Thx

:Libertyterran
Those dark spots are shadows caused by the clouds. As well as the clouds being a huge overexposed mess, they were also rain clouds and quite dark and heavy.

:Surenj
Wow, is all I can say, that looks fantastic for a quick job. I will check out DPReview, thx. I do like the look of the light rays.
As for the processor, well my Dell laptop does start to stuggle a little bit, but that's because I kill it's 60GB hard drive space. If it wasn't for all these work applications it would be fine.

Patience, well this is the process I went through to get the stitch so far:

Create 27 images in Rawshooter for the ground @ 5MB JPG image each ( unfortunatley PF only works in 8bit not 16bit tiff ).
Create 27 images in Rawshooter for the sky @ 5MB JPG image each.
Place the land series into Panorama Factory.
Stitch them manually using a minium 5 control points, some took 8 ( this took ages ) .
Let Panorama Factory create the stitch, adjust for warp of the horizon.
Save the stitch as a layered PDF file ( 877MB ).
Save the project in Panorama Factory.
Rename the Panorama Factory generated land images to that for the ones I have for the sky. ( 27 images remember ).
Open Panorama Factory and the project ( with the stitching points saved ) with the new Sky images subsitiuted instead of the land ones. This fooled Panorama Factory into thinking it was just stitching the same images again.
Stitch those and Save as a layered PDF file ( another 877MB ).
Make sure the PDF file has exposed and layered correctly in CS3, Flatten the image to 123MB ( do this again for the sky ).
Mask the 2 files in CS3 ( took ages ) and save 367MB layerd PSD file.
Start Post processing the file.

I was laying with a gradient blue sky, taking the colours from my first picture.
I found a brush tool on the net that are clouds. I have started to brush a few clouds in replicating the size and position of the original ones. But the cloud tool is pretty limited to the sape the gu had created. Only about 7 different types of clouds.

Here's my attempt so far.

Warwick,
A couple of quick notes: It is rare for sky gradients to run vertically. It is possible to re-shoot the sky - it does not even need to be at the same location.

Far out...didn't realise you had to work that hard at panoramas!! I should try one someday..should be character building.

I like your sky but prob needs a few clouds.. You could copy > edit > transform them and make them look like different clouds to fill up the rest of the sky...

Good luck and would like to see a larger version of the finished product...