Verdict: 4.5 stars Affinity Photo 2 is not a huge leap forward from version 1 for photographers, but more a major refresh and rebranding for Affinity. It remains an extremely powerful professional Photoshop rival at an exceptionally low price. Its tone mapping is superb, its RAW processing can now be applied non-destructively and its central Photo personal is hugely powerful.
Panoramas
Panoramic images are so easy to create now that they hardly take any longer than a regular photograph. If you want to do them with the maximum possible technical accuracy you'll use a panoramic tripod head, adjust your nodal point precisely, rotate the camera to a vertical position for maximum coverage and resolution and then overlap your shots at specific degree intervals.
But you can also shoot panoramas handheld, visually estimating the overlap between frames and worrying about the stitching process later.
Some cameras will even stitch panoramas live, in-camera, though these will be JPEG images that don't really give you any opportunity for fixing things up more carefully later.
Lightroom Boundary Warp explained
Boundary Warp is a new feature in Lightroom Classic CC 2015.4, and if you subscribe to Adobe’s Photography Plan you may have downloaded this update without paying it much attention. But Boundary Warp adds a useful new function to Lightroom’s Panorama Merge feature that lets you keep more of the image area. Normally, the panorama […]
How to create panoramas with Lightroom CC
Amongst the new features introduced with Lightroom Classic CC and Lightroom 6 was the ability to merge panoramas from a series of overlapping frames, without the need for Photoshop. But is it as good at merging images? Let’s see. Panoramas are easy to shoot. A tripod is good, but not essential. The main thing you […]
Create a two-shot Elements Photomerge panorama!
When you hear the word ‘panorama’, you usually think of sweeping, letterbox-shaped vistas which are about ten times wider than they are high. Panoramas this wide, however, are very difficult to print and display effectively, and often lack the visual impact you meant them to have. In fact, traditional ‘panoramic’ cameras didn’t always go this […]
Polar panoramas… on an iPhone?
Polar panoramas are ordinary landscapes turned into miniature spherical planets. Usually, you create them by first shooting a 360-degree panorama as a sequence of overlapping shots and then combining them using Photoshop or some dedicated panoramic stitching software. The polar panorama I’ve created here, though, was produced in about thirty seconds from a single everyday […]