Time Immortal

How about another panoramic? As a general rule, almost every panoramic I have composed has wound up being featured as a Pic of the Day, and certainly there was no way I was going to pass up posting this one.

One of the biggest things I struggle against in editing photos is the natural “fade” that accompanies long-distance shots. As the distance between the lens and the scenery in question increases, the colours become more subdued and hazy. This effect isn’t the easiest to correct for (a UV filter helps a bit, but only a bit), and typically requires a fair number of adjustments. In the past, I’ve gotten lucky with iPhoto’s “Enhance” tool, which has generally done well to bring out the details that distance has diminished.

This time, though, I managed to get the look I wanted in Lightroom.

As usual, I began by editing each photo separately, matching exposures and adjusting colours somewhat in order to get a uniform look across all the shots. I then exported the pictures as TIFF files and loaded them into Hugin, my panorama editor, and lined them up manually using a fair number of control points between each shot.

As usual, Hugin rendered the image well (I can detect a couple of flaws, but that’s okay), and I loaded the result back into Lightroom for additional editing. After fiddling with the contrast and shadow intensity for a bit, and bumping the Clarity up quite high, I got the image to the point it’s at above, which I find quite satisfactory.

Have I mentioned that I’m glad that Lightroom no longer prohibits the import and manipulation of images wider than 10,000 pixels?