Capturing my Sunset

I love panoramic images. I've been trying to capture a decent aerial sunset panorama with a GoPro and RC helicopter for a while, but generally haven't been happy with the results. That is, until last night.

After putting the kids to bed, I realized there was still just a little bit of decent light outside. It was a cloudy, but the sun was peaking through just enough to convince me to go out in the cold and see what I could capture. I set the GoPro to time lapse mode, capturing an image every 5 seconds, then sent the copter up into the sky. Before processing the images, it wasn't all that impressive, but I think the final result speaks for itsself:

sunset Aerial panorama composition quadcopter gopro

I shot these with a GoPro Hero 3+. The basic process is to capture a series of overlapping images rotating around the focal center. Then in post-processing you merge/stitch the images together in Photoshop to create the final panorama. Check out the video below to see a timelapse of the editing process, or read below to see snapshots of this process.

In time lapse mode, I ended up with literally hundreds of images. Many of them are at odd angles, many of them are blurry due to low light and the vibration of the copter motors. Here's a snapshot of the 7 sequential images I used in this panorama:

The first thing to do is align all of the images together to form the base of the composition. You can do this manually, but I used Potoshop's "auto-align" to speed up the process.

Next, you need to blend the layers to create a seamless composition. I generally start by using Photoshop's "auto blend layers" function, which creates layer masks to seamlessly blend individual layers to a single image. You can then edit each individual layer mask to tweak the blending and seams for combining the images.

Once it's blended, you still need to straighten the horizon before it really starts to look like something "normal". You can use Photoshop's "Adaptive Wide Angle" and "Liquify" filters to achieve this. Here's what mine looked like after using both of these, and cropping just a bit:

At this point, it's starting to look decent, but the image is not very interesting, and not very dramatic. I've found that with GoPro images you can make them much more interesting by bringing the shadows up, and bringing highlights down. This reduces contrast and brings out details that didn't draw your attention before.

Still not dramatic enough for me, so I wanted to create separate treatments for the sky and ground, but I wanted them to blend together. So, I used the graduated filter inside of Camera RAW to apply gradient-effects to each. For the sky, I pushed saturation way up to bring out the blues and yetllows, and brought the exposure down to make the clouds darker. Again, I played with shadows and highlights until it was "just right". For the ground I did something similar, but focused more on bringing out the greens and yellows to make the foreground warmer.