Color Correcting uneven skies in Panoramas
I need assistance correcting the color and exposure differences in my landscape panoramas. The skies are uneven after the stitch. any suggestion would be appreciated.
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One of the things to be sure to do is to adjust light fall off in the lens correction tool before stitching. However, it's better to leave most other adjustments until after you have stitched. (Though I would also make sure the white balance settings are the same too. And when I take images that I intend to stitch together, I generally go for manual everything to be sure that the exposure, depth of field, etc is the same on all the images.)
Then if the skies are still a problem, you could look at using the skin tone tab in the Color Editor tool. It can improve the uniformity of all kinds of things, not just skin.
Ian
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Hi Ian,
I went through the steps you suggested and the sky is better. I have exposure and also color discrepancies across the sky. I used the gradient tool to adjust the left corner where it's too light. It's better but there is a color shift from left to right. Right corner is too light. Is there a way to even out the color so it is uniform across the shot? Can I create a color profile for the sky in each shot before stitching? Suggestions?
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Did you use the skin tone tool on the sky as well? It can make the blue more uniform in brightness, as well as more uniform in saturation and in lightness. (But as discussed bellow, I'm not sure that you should.)
You may be chasing an ideal that isn't there. The colour and lightness of the sky is not really uniform - it depends on the angle from the sun, and it varies from top to bottom and side to side. The effect can be quite pronounced with a panorama, because it covers such a wide angle.
I don't think the sky looks unnatural in your photo, and too much uniformity would actually look unnatural.
This is one I took a while ago, from the top of a church tower, covering an extremely wide angle (maybe 120 degrees in total?). I combined three shots, with identical white balance and exposure, and made identical adjustments to light fall-off on all three.
The sky is not the same all the way across. Here are colour readouts from the top left corner and the top right corner. They are not the same. And even if I didn't get the amount of light fall-off quite right (I only adjusted it by eye, but made sure it was the same slider value on all three shots) the readouts are from the same position relative to the top left corner of the left-most and the top right corner of the right-most image. So if the sky colour in reality was the same, the readouts should be the same.
To be honest, I think the result you have got doesn't look at all bad!
Ian
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Hi Ian,
Thanks for your help and encouragement. Another question, why does the clone tool inadequately reproduce the values meant to fill in unstitched parts of the photo? Can the cloned portions be adjusted to match? See upper left sky. Image 1 heal tool. Image 2 Clone tool. Thank you Margaret
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Hi Margaret Stratton .. I tend to use the heal tool for this vs clone tool, and I use a very soft (zero) hardness so there is super clean blending.
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