how to do digital panning

8/9/2019 How to Do Digital Panning

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How To Do Digital PanningA no sweat tip for Perfect Panning...

When I posted this panned picture of a Patrouil de France Alphajet landing during their recent airshow at Subang, a few peoplePM me asking whether it was a real panned shot, and if not, how was it done. Rather than reply to them individually, I willdescribe how I did it here, for whatever it is worth.B)



I don’t want to debate whether it is ethical, allowable or immoral to do the things I do to an image. In my dictionary,

photography is simply optical masturbation. You like to do it and you do it for pleasure.:P

The objective is to create an image for pleasure. It could have been shot by a P&S or a super sophisticated camera. In digital or



on film. Processed and tweaked either in a smelly darkroom or digitally on a computer. The image can be fantasy or reality. Itsimply doesn’t matter. It is the final image that counts. So long as the image is not intended for forensic purposes or foranything illegal or immoral, you can do anything with a picture. The objective is simply the titilation of the optic nerves of

someone who sees the picture. Done simply for pleasure.

With that out of the way, I will try and describe how I created that picture. PS is so versatile there will always be many ways todo something. All the experts out there will no doubt have their own preferred techniques. What I am describing is simply justone of the ways. I hope this description will help a PS newbie to advance their PS skills. To the PS experts out there I say, “Come on. Share your image processing secrets. Let’s all enjoy the pleasure of photography in all its various shades..”

This is the start image. Dull, boring and ordinary. Shot in RAW with a Canon 10D and the Image Stabilizer equipped EF100-400f/4.5-5.6L, at f/5.6, shutter 1/500 sec, focal length 400mm, and ISO 200. I wanted to give it a bit of a lift.



Double Clicking the image within PS File Browser brings out Photoshop’s powerful RAW processor. Shooting in RAW allows you



to conveniently change the white balance and colour temperature to whatever you like, irrespective of what you chose duringthe shooting stage. You do this by clicking the down arrow in the White Balance window, and selecting any of the standardpresets of Daylight, Cloudy, Flourescent, Tungsten, etc. Or you can choose Custom and adjust the Colour Temperature and Tint

to any combination you like. Other sliders allow you to vary the Exposure, Shadows, Brightness, Contrast and Saturation.Complete flexibility to change things even after you've shot the image. With RAW you need only to ensure that your image isproperly focused and framed at the instant of shooting the picture. You can change everything else in the computer. Such is theadvantage and flexibility of RAW that these days, I shoot only in RAW.

Having said that however, I have to also say that it is best to get your in-camera picture to be as near perfect as possible. Then

you dont have to do so much post processing. If you are a pro, time is money, and the pro will always try to get his picture tobe perfect right out of the camera. Hobbyists like me, with all the time in the world, can afford to be slip shod and rely on postprocessing to rescue my pictures. Its always better to strive for perfection straight in the camera.



You need to experiment and play with those sliders to see the combination you prefer. Other Tabs in the RAW processowindow allow you to adjust the Sharpness, to reduce color noise and to smoothen Luminence. I wont explain what they do

Best that you try them out yourself to see the effects

Once you’ve adjusted the image to your personal preference within the RAW processor, clicking on OK will place the image ithe PS workspace which will allow you to further tweak the image if you want to. If not, you can simply save it in a format thayou want. Within the image processing window of PS, you can crop the image and fine tune the colours using various ImagAdjustment PS tools. You can add or remove stuff and do all sorts of things. When tweaking an image, I always work o

adjustment layers so that the original image is not permanently changed

Here is the cropped and tweaked image ready for transformation into a panned shot.



The next step is to extract the aeroplane and to place it on its own layer. There are several ways to do it.The quick and dirty way is to use the Lasso tool to roughly draw an outline around the plane. You can also use the pen tool tdo the selection. Or you could use the Extract Filter. With the marching ants visible around the plane you hit Ctrl+C to copy th

selection, and Ctrl+V to paste the selection on its own layer. You then use the eraser tool to erase the unwanted parts arounthe plane using progressively smaller and softer brushes until you get a clean extracted image of the plane on its owtransparent layer. Laborious work but who says there is pleasure without pain ?

Here is my rough lasso of the plane.



It is easier to work in PS if you have a Wacom Pen and Tablet. I use the Wacom Intuos 2 shown below. Wacom makes variousizes at various prices. The grand-daddy of their range is actually a touch sensitive LCD screen on which you can directly edian image. Last I checked it cost about RM15k. The Intuos 2 Tablet below at about RM1.5k is good enough for me



After lassoing the plane and while it is on its own layer, you use the eraser to delete the unwanted parts. You could also use amask with black as the colour to brush out the unwanted parts, and white to brush back in those parts you have accidentallyerased.

And here is the extracted image of the plane on its own layer.



Once you’ve got the plane on its own layer, tweak the colours a bit with the image adjustment tools for curves or levels, coloubalance, brightness, saturation, contrast, etc. Then sharpen it a little by applying the Unsharp Mask filter to it. When you arhappy with the extracted plane, temporarily switch off the visibility of the plane layer. You are now ready to create the motio

blurred layer

To do this, make a copy of the background layer and then apply Filter/Blur/Motion Blur to background layer copy. You camove the slider to the right to get more blur and to the left to lessen it. Set the angle to zero. I use a value of 35 pixels for thdistance. Here’s what the motion blurred layer looks like. Remember, this layer is below your cut out of the plane which itemporarily invisible..



If you now switch on the visibility of your plane cut out, this is what you'll get - a perfect digitally pan blurred picture of a planlanding. You probably need to do a bit of work to clone out the motion blurred parts in front of the plane. Nothing tcomplicated there.

Easy .....



__________________

Yusuf Hashim

http://www.digitalartist.com.my/

http://www.digitalartist.com.my/

how to do digital panning

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