Haleakala Pano | Kevin Dowie Photography

Haleakala Pano.

Continuing with the Haleakala National Park photographs and today it’s a stitched panoramic image. Looking into the sun meant that the image was a bit washed out as far as colour and contrast went so I ended up boosting those values in photoshop. The final image is a stitched composite of six vertical frames all taken at a focal length of 16mm. Some linear distortion is pretty much unavoidable at ultra wide angle and so the first step in processing was to carry out a lens correction on all 6 images in preparation for the auto align and blending. Once the composite was created some further processing was required:

distortion correction using the transform tools
contrast increased using a curves adjustment layer
a second curves layer used to further modify the foreground contrast, the effect being isolated by the use of a graduated mask
colour saturation increased in all colour values and then more specifically in the red and yellow values
some localised distortion control used for the halo around the sun to ensure it was rendered as circular in shape
increased the canvas size to give the white border
text layers for the caption and copyright reminder
resizing, sharpening and conversion to jpeg for internet display

The composite image file ended up being a bit of a monster to process given the file size grew to nearly a gigabyte. The final image dimensions, not counting the border, ended up at roughly 8300 x 5300 pixels, enough for a 30 x 20 inch full resolution print without the need for interpolation. Some people have previously asked, “why not simply use a wide angle lens to get the scene in a single frame?” when presenting such stitched composites/panoramas. The reason is coverage or angle of view. Even my widest lens, the 16-35mm zoom can’t get the entire scene in one frame.

Given the restraints of the blog format, the image is presented here at my standard 800 pixels, to see it large click on the image. The linked large image can be saved by right clicking and used as a screen saver or wallpaper for those that are interested. Please be aware that the image is, of course the subject of copyright like everything else presented here, it’s provided for personal enjoyment not commercial use. Cheers. ~KD

haleakala pano