Maroon Bells in 4K and 8K

as i was passing by Pain After reducing my photo storage, it was a fun experience to go back to my initial work and see if there was anything worth keeping there. While deleting a large collection of panoramic images, I found some photos that I stopped saving. Interestingly, I realized that at the time I was taking these photos, Lightroom had no panorama capability to create a single DNG image from RAW shots (I used PTGui and Photoshop at the time). So I selected some vertical panoramic shots captured at different shutter speeds (admittedly, I had no idea). how to capture panorama at that time) and let Lightroom work its magic.

To my surprise, the panorama was stitched perfectly, and the end result looked quite nice. After some tweaking of the sliders and removing some healing spots, I extracted the image in both 4K and 8K resolution to share with my readers.

If you want to download the 4K and 8K versions of Panorama, here are the links:

Lessons Learned:

• Do not delete the original RAW/DNG files of images you care about. The software will get better in the future, and you may want to go back, re-view, and possibly even re-edit those images. Your editing preferences and even display hardware may change in the future.
• Modern software is very good at compensating for small photographic errors and variables. A panorama obviously needs to be shot at the same shutter speed, aperture and ISO. But if you’ve already made a mistake, feed those images into post-processing software and see what it can do. In this particular case, Lightroom automatically compensated for the shutter speed differences by adjusting the brightness of each image to average. Also, I remember I dropped my 24-70mm f/2.8G on the ground right before that trip (ouch), so parts of the image were soft. Lightroom did a solid job of maintaining only the sharp areas of the photo.
• Even if your old images were shot with a low-resolution camera (the D700 had a 12 MP sensor), you may still be able to enhance the images and make them look better. Upscaling technology has already gotten really good, and it’s only going to get better from here. For the 8K version of the image, I enhanced it using the Lightroom “Enhance” (Super Resolution) feature, then downscaled it to 8K during the export process.
• Photographers often chase “blood red” sunrises and sunsets, and I’m certainly guilty of being one of them. Interestingly, when I needed a print for the walls of my home those reds weren’t that good for me – the colors were too vibrant and there was no furniture with similar colors to match. In comparison, B&W, yellow, green and blue colors were much easier to work with. Although I have sunrise versions of the same scene, I prefer the above image for both print and display views. So I’m glad I stayed here after sunrise and took these photos.

Please enjoy these images and feel free to use them as you wish!