The Hasselblad XPan was a classic 35mm ‘panoramic’ camera developed in partnership with Fujifilm. What made it special was its unique widescreen aspect ratio, creating images measuring 65mm x 24mm on 35mm film. You can recreate this unique perspective in Lightroom, together with some of the XPan’s analog rendering. Here’s how.
The Pan accepted a range of three interchangeable lenses, and while you could probably recreate these angles of view accurately with some mathematical calculations, I’m just going to take the easy route and simply recreate that ultra-wide aspect ratio without these.
Now in theory you could just crop any regular image to the XPan aspect ratio, but there are a couple of issues with this. One is that you would be discarding a lot of your camera’s resolution, and another is that you would need to be shooting with an ultra-wide lens in the first place.
My solution is to shoot two overlapping images and then merge them in Lightroom. That way I can get the wide angle of view and at decent level of resolution for cropping afterwards.
01 Merge your images
I took these two photos with a panoramic image in mind. They were taken handheld with the same focus point and exposure, but with the camera turned a little to the right for the second shot, so that it overlapped the first by about a third of the frame width.
In Lightroom, all I need to do is select the two images, right-click and choose Photo Merge > Panorama. This opens the Panorama Merge Preview dialog.
02 Panorama Merge Preview
There are a few options to think about in the Panorama Merge Preview window. One is the Projection. I find the Cylindrical projection gives the best results for shots like this, thought the Spherical option can work too.
You’ll see that panorama merges produce messy edges, so what can you do about this?
- The Boundary Warp slider is one option. This pushes the edges of the image out into the corners, but it does introduce some distortion
- Fill Edges uses Adobe’s content-aware fill feature to fill in the blank areas around the edges with detail from the rest of the image. It works well with scenes like this with few tricky repeating patterns, so it’s what I’m going to use here
- Auto Crop simply crops out these blank areas, so if that’s what you would have done anyway, it simply saves you the effort. You can lose quite a lot of the image, though
I’m going to leave the Auto Settings box checked so that Lightroom will apply its auto adjustments to the merged image. I’m leaving the Create Stack box unchecked, but that’s up to you.
03 Create a custom crop ratio
Lightroom will merge this panorama into a new DNG file, and I’ve got this open in the Develop module. The first thing I want to do is recreate the XPan’s unique 65:24 aspect ratio, and for this I need the Crop tool. This has a drop-down menu where you can select a number of pre-configured aspect ratios, but you can also create your own with the Enter Custom option.
This displays this Enter Custom Aspect Ratio window where I can type in ’65’ and ’24’. There’s no need to worry about units, since this is the ratio of width to height, not the actual image dimensions.
You’ll see that when you do this, Lightroom will add your custom ratio to the drop-down menu, so you can just select it here in future.
04 Crop and rotate as required
With this custom crop option enabled you can now straighten and crop the photo as required, and the crop marquee will always retain that 65:24 aspect ratio.
05 Add a vignette
XPan lenses may show a little corner shading at wider apertures – there was a center filter you could use to counteract this – but this seems a good excuse anyway to add a little post-crop vignette effect in Lightroom. This adds to the analog feel too. My one suggestion? Once you start to see the vignette effect clearly, it’s too much.
06 Add some grain
Again, it’s not essential, but it does add to the analog feel. Lightroom’s grain effect is actually rather good because it doesn’t just overlay the image with a grain pattern, it actually merges the grain with the detail, so that object edges are ‘eroded’ in an authentic-looking way.
To add the grain effect I first zoomed in to 200% so that I could judge the amount of grain properly, then pushed the Amount slider up to 20. This panel also has Size and Roughness sliders but I just left these at their default value of 50.
07 Try a different profile
The color rendering of digital images is typically accurate but not evocative, so as a finishing touch, why not take a look through Lightroom’s different profiles? You can browse through these in the Basic panel, and towards the bottom is a section called ‘Modern’ which does have strong and varied styles. I’ve chosen ‘Modern 03’, which gives a slightly warm, vintage look.
08 The finished image
Now I’m not going to pretend this looks exactly like a Hasselblad XPan image – there’s a lot you can do with a quality photo editor like Lightroom, but analog film has a look of its own that you can never quite replicate digitally.
Nevertheless, I think this is in the spirt of the original XPan, with that ultra-wide aspect ratio and the merging of two overlapping photos into a wider one – this is not just a simple crop.
One of the compelling things about the XPan is this extra-wide ratio and the effect it has on the composition of an image and the way you see and capture the world. You don’t have to stick to your camera sensor’s native aspect ratio!
