Forth Bridges - re-edit

Panoramic photo (photo stitch) taken 12th September 2021 and originally edited using Lightroom and Photoshop - before some of the newer AI supported tools became available - so re-visited and re-edited the same files to compare.

I get as much enjoyment out of the post processing part of digital photography, spend as much time trying to keep up with the developments in the digital darkroom as with the cameras themselves.

I think that with so many people out there taking photos nowadays, we all need some other strings to our bows to get noticed.

So, this section on my site will cover a bit of that, and look under the bonnet at some of the pieces that I create.

12th Sep 2021 & 7th July 2023

I tend to avoid the bridges down this way as there are plenty of fantastic photographs of them around already, but we were staying overnight here, I'd had a couple of glasses of wine and I couldn't resist the low clouds and twinkly lights of the three big bridges over the Firth. But, the area they take up is huge, so the plan was to use a fisheye lens and shoot for a panoramic image that would be stitched together later.

Turned out a bit more complicated than that...

Queensferry Crossing, Forth Road & Forth Bridges - 21 Sep 2021 - This was the finished version of the first edit I completed back in 2021.

The original edit consisted of three individual shots stitched together in Lightroom to create a new Digital Negative (DNG) which then went back and forth (yea, I know...) a few times between Lightroom and Photoshop to fix.

The nature of the fisheye lens and the distortion that creates meant Lightroom struggled to stitch it all that well (the cables on the bridges it almost gave up on completely) so there was a bit of Cloning and Liquify-ing to get the three shots playing nicely together.

But, overall I was happy with it. But then Adobe brought some fantastic Enhance tools into Lightroom, and Photoshop threw 'Generative Fill' into the mix too. So, into the archive and back to to the RAW files it was.

This time I wanted to see if I could use the fourth (yea... I know) photograph to get it even wider than before

No big tripod, just a gorillapod, some nice Merlot and a half shut eye/half cut Brian to steady these original shots. Got caught out with the images on the mirrorless camera screen looking fine in the dark, but never checked the histogram so these were a bit underexposed.

Camera settings across all shots - Manual mode/manual focus • f5.6 - 10 sec - ISO 400.

TIP: Always check your histograms.

All RAW files were processed using Lightroom's 'Enhance' tool - Denoise and RAW Details really picked up after that.

Shifted the white balance up the Kelvin scale for a different look before opening them all in Photoshop to try and correct the fisheye effect before stitching them, using the 'Adaptive Wide Angle' filter. Saved back as 16 bit TIFFs.

Stitched together, and this time Lightroom managed all four without a hitch (almost!)

I was aiming for a 16:9 ratio image, but cropping to keep the width needed meant a gap appeared when openmed back into Photoshop (Beta). Time for some Generative fills...

I could have selected the whole gap at once and filled it, but I think Generative fill works in 1024 pixels blocks. So, doing that would've scaled a small block up to the full width of this image (around 8000 pixels) and that would look rubbish. Multiple smaller sections generated and it worked out perfect. 👌

More generative magic to remove the fencing on the far left, and so that I could keep the marina and lights over there in the crop.

This worked very well first time too - generated some extra rocks with no joins or artefacts.

I mentioned the stitch was 'almost' perfect, but across the Forth Road Bridge there was a glitch.

Some clone tool work and pixel pushing with the Liquify tool patched this up

And the same for the southern end of the Forth Bridge

The fisheye lens is quite soft as shown here in a 100% crop. None of the sharpening tools in LR or PS worked on this, so it was over to Topaz Sharpen AI to see how that coped

This is the the same section after processing in Topaz

Comparing the four options that were shown in the Sharpening software, the 'Motion Blur' fix seemed to look best - went with that

Some final editing in Lightroom, with some variations explored, I was much happier with the results compared to the first attempt.

More panorama, less noise and artefacts, and most of the small glitches I let slide all fixed.

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