panaramas are hard!!!

Mike86 said:

I have tried several stitching programs & I think Canon's
Photostitch is as good as any. I have tried PhotoShop Elements
stitching program & it was the worst. Always had very distinct
stitch lines. This may be the same as PS.

Click to expand...

The free "panorama tools" suite is quite excellent, but requires a GUI to make it practical. PTAssember and PTGUI are both good, recently HUGIN (free) is catching up and is now reasonably useable. With these and some experience it is possible to achieve excellent results with a wide range of situations including very wide lenses, strong lens errors and small shear errors (moving the camera laterally during the sequence).

Handheld S60 (wide end) shots with near and far objects, for example - just keeping an eye on the location of the front of the lens when rotating the camera.

They take a bit of computer power, and are probably not for the casual user, but are a step up from photostitch (or three).

Nearly 1/2 of my exposures are processed through PTAssember.

Ken

It helps on wide angle lens shots with lots of distortion.

Both taken with the sigma 10-20





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Lazy winter days are here again. Wont the sun come out and play?

Well i must thank everyone that answered my post; you all have turned what i thought was a catastrophe into a thing of beauty. I used PTlens in combination with Photostitch and my pano actually came out perfect!!! I don't know how either of those programs really works but hey, it works, so i'm not complaining. I would show everyone my results but i don't know how to post my pics on the net. If you could fill me on that as well, i think you'll like my shots.
Thanks again!!
I love this forum!

Shakens said:

my 8 shot panarama using my S2-IS
http://putfile.com/pic.php?pic=8/21817395930.jpg&s=x1

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that was taken standing with S2-IS in my hand and put together with canons own software

I just finished playing with AutoStitch & it does a pretty good job. Maybe has the edge on others I have tried, but not perfect.

I have a particularly troublesome shot, a handheld with 3 pictures. Has several tall buildings against a blue sky. Problem is buildings tilt a bit between shots. This has caused ghosting with most programs as the buildings are in the stitching area. And you can see the blend in the blue sky.

I have straightened up the buildings using Photoshop Elements before stitching & this solved the problem with Canon's Photostitch program. However you can see the blending in the sky. When using Autostitch, it created a somewhat dark cloud at the top of the buildings, however the sky looked great. Perhaps playing with some of the settings in AutoStitch may improve things.

One previous program I tried relied on matching up points between shots. But it was not any better than Canon's Photostitch. In fact either this one or another one created crooked pictures when trying to match up areas on shots that were not horizontally aligned.

I think it's very important to keep the shots aligned when panning. Unfortunately I don't carry a tripod with me on vacation.

Mike

Erik Olsson said:

Hi all!

A question about panoramas from a photography newbie:

Is it a correct assumption that when doing landscape panoramas like
the ones above (all of them beautiful, btw), one should physically
"strafe" left or right between pictures? As opposed to standing
still and rotating the camera that is.
The exception I presume would be 360 degree panoramas, where you
would have to stay in the same spot.

Thanks in advance
Erik

Click to expand...

Canon's Photostitch works both ways. When doing landscape panoramas you are going to stand in one spot & rotate. It typically would be very difficult to "strafe" left or right between pictures because the objects in the landscape may be blocks or miles apart, such as in a mountain range.

I did an inside series of shots of a picture on wall that was the width of the room, probably 30 feet wide. In this case I "strafed" from left to right between pictures & took 5 shots. The end pictures would have been very distorted due to the angle if I would have stood in one spot. As it was, the pictures are distorted because I had to point the camera high on the wall. I did so much correcting & tweaking & the panoramas still are not right.

Mike

George Gabriel said:

The software I love for panoramas is Autostitch (best it's free):
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html
...

Click to expand...

George Gabriel said:

Try it, it did miracles for me.

Click to expand...

George, just downloaded Autostitch. You're right, it's fantastic. Included a panorama of a sunset I took as I was driving south - by the time I found a suitable place to stop, the best of the sunset had past, but nevertheless, I am really impressed by how Autostitch dealt with it.
Sorry, the pic is a bit large.

Thanks for the tip George!

--



Aussie Ken
Perth, Western Australia
http://www.aperturehead.com/Aussieken

(nt)

Thanks for the info on AutoStitch. I don't know how I ever missed this one. Looks like AutoStitch and Canon's Photostitch are the ones I'll use or play with the most.

Mike

I played some more & have a series of 3 shots that AutoStitch could not stitch. (Canon's Photostitch does work) Message was to the effect it could not find matching points. I took them from a boat on a cloudy day. The sky is gray & so is the water. I'm presuming there are not enough objects on the beach for the program to lock in on, or they also are to blah looking. IOW, not a colorful picture. I changed some of the settings several times per the readme file, but to no avail.

Any suggestions on what parameters to tweak?

Mike

In some rare unexplainable cases Autostitch couldn't "see" the match between 2 shots.

It happened only once in my case, Canon software worked just fine but with Canon software, the panorama looked pretty bad, you could see the stitches.

Just like in your case, the 2 photos that Autostitch didn't recognize were mostly grey, water and sky (cloudy day on a lake).
Check the photo here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/giorgios/70729668/in/set-1702828/



For tips about Autostitch please visit the Autostitch group at flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/79139841@N00/

George
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Mike86 said:

loved the S1, got the S2

Click to expand...

http://flickr.com/photos/giorgios

George,

Thanks for the reply. I guess the good news is that I'm not the only one experiencing this "bug", & hopefully this means I'm doing things right.

I'll check out the link you provided.

Thanks again.
Mike

Under merge modes there is Camera, Parallel and Scanner.

The Scanner mode will accept images of different sizes (as in cropped) and different focal lengths and still attempt to stitch. Haven't found anything else that will do that.

Sometimes (handheld, etc.) the normal modes (spherical, cylindrical or rectilinear) in any other program just won't work.

Ed

Hi,

What were the settings on your camera? I usually use stitch assist mode, which has something between 25-50% overlap area between adjacent pictures. I then stitch them together with Canon's StitchAssist software that came with my cameras (G3 and S2). The restuls are great! Some of them are in my galley below (go there to see larger pictures)...

Outlook from Abas Basha, Mt. Sinai:



Original size: 6429 x 2090 pixels

Lago di Tovel, Italy:



Original size: 8861 x 2283 pixels

Passo Sela, Italy:



Original size: 3419 x 2295 pixels

Near Te Anau, New Zealand:



Original size: 8872 x 1391 pixels

360 degrees view in the Milford Track, New Zealand (made of almost 20 pictures):



Original size: 16614 x 2386 pixels

And last, Cathedral Cove beach, Coromandel Peninsula, New Zealand:



Original size: 9734 x 1562 pixels

--
Oren Sarid
Israel

Please click to see my pictures, comment and rate them in my gallery at http://oren.sarid.fotopic.net/

When shooting a panorama, it is very important to use the same aperture and speed on all, otherwise the colors won't match and you can't stitch. In the stitch assist mode the camera uses the first shot's measure for all. For that reason, try shooting the first picture at the brightest part of the panorama. If the brightest shot is not at the side of your desired panorama, shoot it, and then move back to the start of the panorama. When stitching - don't use it.

If you're not using the panorama mode, just make sure you measure the light from the brightest shot, then use this measure for the entire panorama.

--
Oren Sarid
Israel

Please click to see my pictures, comment and rate them in my gallery at http://oren.sarid.fotopic.net/