I did downscale this image to 6144x2048 so some of the above might be hard(er) to find.
Finally! After days of force 5-6 winds, rain and overall greyness there was a window of good weather this morning to shoot a panorama that I had in mind for a while.
Some info about this shot:
Shot with: Nikon D750 + a Nikkor AF-S 85mm 1.4G
f11, 1/80s, ISO 100
Panorama: 9 shots (portrait)
Post processed with: Hugin + RawTherapee
Original image size: 129.5 MP / 22731x5697 (~ 4:1)
Image after processing: 97.3 MP / 17091x5697 (3:1)
Question
This is my first serious panorama and I did notice something of which I’m not sure if I did something wrong or if this is to be expected when shooting wider panoramas.
If you look at the sky you can see that the colour slowly desaturates. In the posted image this is most notable when looking from the copse of trees in the foreground (my original centre point) to the left. But in the full panorama it is visible to both sides.
Initially I though that I forgot to remove my polarizing filter (I did not), nor did I use any other filter.
This panorama was shot in the following way:
Shots taken at 10:20. Sun, still low in the sky, almost parallel with my left shoulder.
The copse of trees was the centre point (shot 5), I focused on the tree trunks and then disabled auto focus.
Exposure, for the highlights, was determined by the white of the cow, manually dialled in and not changed in between the 9 shots.
Shot from left to right with a 45/50% overlap, with not more then roughly 1 second between each shot.
The blueness of the sky depends on what angle you are from the sun as you shoot. You can heighten this effect with a polarizer. As you turn towards the sun, there is less blue in the sky. I see this consistently with my 24mm lens (this is also why a polarizer on a wide angle yields some wonky results).
If you want a consistent sky, clone the good parts of the sky over the bad parts.
I had hoped for more clouds after the stormy conditions, but as you can see in the image; There aren’t any. Things to keep in mind when shooting panorama’s.
BTW: I’m assuming that you see this with your 24mm when shooting landscape oriented, single shots.
Right, mostly landscape… I don’t shoot portrait orientation often with that lens, but the field of view when in a portrait orientation should be narrow enough that you don’t get this effect.
I just had a rather quick go at “fixing” the sky in GIMP.
Cloning doesn’t seem to get good results, probably because there’s a very gradual gradient going om. This method would work when having more clouds (or a sky from another image).
Using a subtle bi-linear gradient from white to the darkest blue from above the copse does work. This is applied to the sky and for the best result you do need to exclude the clouds.
Anyway, just thought I mention this in case others are curious for a solution.
I should say rather The blueness of the sky depends on what angle you are from the sun as you look at.
it is not an effect due to photo but a physical property of light going through material. So sky color is not uniform.
There is no fix needed, but for artistic reason you can carefully modify the sky or even replace it, but unless you take care of this gradient, it will look unrealistic and fake.
There is nothing weird in the sky and it seems ok for me considering the position of the sun.
Yeah, I figured that I didn’t do anything wrong after @paperdigits’ reply and that this was just physics doing its thing. I just didn’t notice it in any of my single shot images (I do not have a wide-angle lens as of yet).
The reason I put fixing between double quotes in my previous reply is because, strictly speaking, it actually does not need fixing at all. But I was curious if something like this could be done and if it would be aesthetically pleasing. You really do need to be careful when doing this though.
