Large Digitally-Composed London Frieze

The London Panorama that measures 18 metres long in its entirety.

This large digitally-composed project for Artinsite and St Thomas’ Hospital was composed of 53 individual shots which were taken from the top of the hospital. Bill Greenwood Ltd took on the job of stitching them together to create a panorama of much of central London. The resulting print, when put together, measures 18 meters in length. The length of two buses!

With the public able to press their nose right up against the art and scrutinise the picture closely, each join had to be pixel-perfect. This process took over 6o hours of retouching to complete. The final print-ready file was 3 gigabytes in size.

Working in windy conditions in a roof-top for any job is difficult, but photographer Ed Webb did some meticulous pre-planning and overcame many challenges. He delivered the superb imagery as a basis to work with on this large digitally-composed image. It was a digital art-workers dream to get images as good as these.

Photography and Retouching

From a super zoomed-in retouching point of view, even the slightest movement of the mounted camera was detectable. Later, we removed camera-shake on all of the 53 shots, whilst also correcting the lens distortion. This large digitally-composed image would show it all if we weren’t careful.

We rebalanced the depth of field and the colour between the shots. And, we removed all the time-lapse elements, including people, cars, and buses. Sometimes we re-instated them somewhere else.

We created this incredible piece by doing over 60 hours of retouching.