tips & tricks: photographing a room wider than your lens

Over the years I've developed various techniques for photographing interiors without resorting to a fisheye lens, which just produces ghastly results. (It does have its place, but not when trying to accurately convey the essence of an interior space!) Since I often get asked "how did you acheive such and such an effect", I thought I'd share some of my techniques with you, using the Boutique @ 10's spacious Lion's Head Suite as an example...

When taking the photos, use a tripod to ensure your horizon stays level, set your camera to manual and use the same exposure for all the shots. Shoot in vertical format to give you more floor and ceiling to work with, because you're going to need to crop some of it out. You'll notice that the horizontal lines, such as the join between the walls and ceiling, are at different angles in each photograph. This is is unavoidable (simply due to the fact that the angle of view, as well as the position of the lense, is slightly different for each shot), and what presents the problems when stitching the images together.

I always shoot in RAW format, which allows me to adjust the colour, tone, saturation and contrast without loosing quality, and I don't have to fiddle unnecessarily with the camera settings and can focus on composition while shooting. Lightroom also allows you to correct for lens distortions, removing the slight barrel effect created by wider lenses, as well as corner vignetting, so the colours in adjacent photos blend better.

Once you've processed the photos to your liking, bring them into Photoshop and use the Photomerge function (under the File -> Automate menu). Try out the various methods of merging and see what works best for you. When shooting landscapes I usually just reposition the images because there is just one horizon line, but interiors (and rainbows!) have more than one continuous line that needs to match up, so in this case I use the Auto option, making sure "Blend Images Together" is checked.

As you can see, you end up with all the straight lines joined, but curved - not quite as horrendous as a fish-eye image, but not the effect we're after!

Warp tool to the rescue! (found under the Edit->Transform menu). The amount of  tweaking will vary from image to image, but in most cases you'll find you'll need to drag the top corners up and and slightly out, dip the top middle down and the bottom middle up, etc., until the horizontal lines are straight. Be careful to keep the warp lines on the same vertical plain to avoid the vertical objects in your image from leaning over!

Finally, fill in any missing areas using the clone tool, the patch tool, or the content fill menu, manually tweak any lines that aren't quite right and make any other adjustments that will make the image just right. (One of the things I did was clone in the chandelier from the original image, as you'll notice that the merged one got been terribly distorted.)

It's not as perfect as it would be if it was taken with a genuine panoramic camera, but for a good few thousand rand less, you can accurately convey the essence of your interior space!