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155 MegaPixel D2Xs Image -- Part 1

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gonzalu said:
Click to expand...
I really love the color. I have never had great luck (read: any) with
hand-held panos, and little more than that otherwise. I've always just
used the Photoshop dohickey for it. Sometimes it kinda works, but never
this well. Trying to pivot on the nodal point handheld or w/o the magic
tripod head is tough.

One thing: even though I would dream of suggesting you do this to your
awesome shot, I myself can never seem to resist using a perspective
transform in Photoshop to square up the keystoning, making wide angle
shots look like they were taken with a telephoto from much further away.
I think this may be a personal foible of mine, however, because you
often see published work with considerable perspective distortion of
this sort.

I'm not even calling it perspective distortion , since it's the natural
way we view things. That is, parallel lines in a plane appear to
meet at infinity instead of going on forever. This doesn't bother us,
and the application of perspective to art in the early Renaissance
is obviously much better than that without perspective I guess
that with a wide lens, infinity (ok, the vanishing point) can seem
so much closer than reality would have it that it seems weird.

Is it just me? Does anybody else routinely try to fix this up? Or do
just go buy a view camera kit and be done with it? :-)

I guess if there's just a little bit, like the 2% horizon incline built
into my wetware (I believe I've got a 2% extraocular imbalance based on
the defocused finger test), or the unintentional keystoning caused by
not having the focal plane of a wide lense precisely parallel to a wall
when I meant to, that I would want fix it. But if I were shooting a
tree etc and wanted that look, of course I wouldn't change it a bit.

--tom
 
Hi Manny,

Nice job. I was looking at this software myself. I'm planning a trip to the Grand Canyon and surrounding sites and this could be of great use!

How well did it handle the blending? Did you have to do much manual adjustment to get the sky to look so good? Also, did you manually set your white balance before shooting, or just shoot with auto and set it via RAW processing?

Thanks!

--
  • Chuck
http://www.pbase.com/csimet
 
If any of your shots cross the straight line directly in front of you, you will get this effect. Bot hthe above were not shot from the very edge.

I mean, You shoot from one edge and only go left or only go right... never left AND right.

This image below was shot as I said, only to the left of me...



and this is a MULTI-ROW image also shot starting on the right edge and all shots were to the left... never to the right.



However, this one, it was shot from the middle LEFT and RIGHT. But the image works OK because it is NOT including any architectural straight lines which would show distortion.



The image of the interior of the chalet is indeed a 180 degree pano, not 360 :-)

--
Manny
http://www.pbase.com/gonzalu/
http://www.mannyphoto.com/
FCAS Member - http://manny.org/FCAS
 
gonzalu said:
Thanks for the big word. I didn't know there was a way to say what
I explained in one word LOL.
Click to expand...
gonzalu said:
I bet that if I had said it, then everyone would have asked what it
meant.
Click to expand...
Perhaps, but they wouldn't have asked you; they'd've asked a dictionary,
whose job it is to answer such questions and readily available on line.
Asking the writer would be a mark of laziness. At least I didn't spell
it in Greek script, eh? :-) On the other hand, it's really a great deal
harder to use a dictionary to find a word that you don't yet know, which
of course is why I gave it to you. Imagine a yoke of oxen ploughing
out a fur(row )long, then upon reaching its end, turning to plough
the next one, back and forth all day. Dot matrix printers would often
work this way. I just noticed that Wiki has a cool example:



I've known about it for something like forever, but it's part of my
subculture(s), as this entry from the Hacker's Dictionary explains:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/B/boustrophedon.html

--tom
 


I hate messing with perspective and distort because it screws around with actual image data thereby damaging the initial image. Given that it has already been stretched a bit by the stitching tools, I don;t like it even more.

I think that I could probably do more with it in PTGui before final blending... We'll see. This little test for you took my PC about 1 hour to do it on the full size image. The cost CPU-wise is great. I may or may not do it depending on the final intent.
Tom Christiansen said:
gonzalu said:
Click to expand...
I really love the color. I have never had great luck (read: any) with
hand-held panos, and little more than that otherwise. I've always
just
used the Photoshop dohickey for it. Sometimes it kinda works, but
never
this well. Trying to pivot on the nodal point handheld or w/o the
magic
tripod head is tough.

One thing: even though I would dream of suggesting you do this to your
awesome shot, I myself can never seem to resist using a perspective
transform in Photoshop to square up the keystoning, making wide angle
shots look like they were taken with a telephoto from much further
away.
I think this may be a personal foible of mine, however, because you
often see published work with considerable perspective distortion of
this sort.

I'm not even calling it perspective distortion , since it's the
natural
way we view things. That is, parallel lines in a plane appear to
meet at infinity instead of going on forever. This doesn't bother us,
and the application of perspective to art in the early Renaissance
is obviously much better than that without perspective I guess
that with a wide lens, infinity (ok, the vanishing point) can seem
so much closer than reality would have it that it seems weird.

Is it just me? Does anybody else routinely try to fix this up? Or do
just go buy a view camera kit and be done with it? :-)

I guess if there's just a little bit, like the 2% horizon incline
built
into my wetware (I believe I've got a 2% extraocular imbalance
based on
the defocused finger test), or the unintentional keystoning caused by
not having the focal plane of a wide lense precisely parallel to a
wall
when I meant to, that I would want fix it. But if I were shooting a
tree etc and wanted that look, of course I wouldn't change it a bit.

--tom
Click to expand...
--
Manny
http://www.pbase.com/gonzalu/
http://www.mannyphoto.com/
FCAS Member - http://manny.org/FCAS
 
Ohhhh, you lucky devil. Family trip or photo trip? If photo, I wish I was so lucky.

PTGui is an amazing program. It is rated by the authors to easily do multi gigapixel stitches. I believe it. It will use RAM until it is gone and then switch to swap on disk as needed for larger images. This one, originally over 200 MP, needed 15GB swap space (not including Windows SWAP)

No color correction, nothing done to the images before converting. I used the JPG fine straight out of camera. It is important to let the stitching engine do its job on original data. If you correct individual images before stitching, you risk having a bad edge blend.

The PTGui engine takes care of the edge lending completely automagically. It can also use external open source tools like ENDBLEND or SMARTBLEND. But i have found the built in blending engine to be, well, magical :-)

After stitching, I bring the raw PSD or JPG from PTGui (it can save 16 bit PSDs even layered so you can do manual correction of things like people cut in half etc. But I warn you, it is so damn good, you'll have to be shooting panos in times square before you have to manually adjust cut off people :-)

I then collapse the whole thing and BEGIN my normal Post Processing (Curves, Levels, Hue/Sat, Contrast etc.

This pano was on full auto. The more sharpness you have and the more pixels you have, the better it works. Take a look at the UNSTITCHED preview on my second post above and then the final image. Look at all those seams... it just blends magically.

Chuck, you will be soooo happy with this program. Trust me on this one... If you don't like it, I'll buy it off of you LOL.

Cheers.
Manny
csimet said:
Hi Manny,

Nice job. I was looking at this software myself. I'm planning a
trip to the Grand Canyon and surrounding sites and this could be of
great use!

How well did it handle the blending? Did you have to do much
manual adjustment to get the sky to look so good? Also, did you
manually set your white balance before shooting, or just shoot with
auto and set it via RAW processing?

Thanks!

--
  • Chuck
http://www.pbase.com/csimet
Click to expand...
--
Manny
http://www.pbase.com/gonzalu/
http://www.mannyphoto.com/
FCAS Member - http://manny.org/FCAS
 
Hi,

Firstly - great work on that pano it looks lovely. I just wanted to add my thoughts on the camera settings, etc based on my own experiences. I figure some of the readers of this thread will benefit - so it's not intended as personal advice. Your results speak for themself!

Yes, the software can do a great job of blending the images but you can virtually eliminate the need to blend my setting your camera first. The general (and perhaps slightly old school) thoughts on taking pano shots are:

1) Choose or preset a white balance and use that for all shots. Obviously if you shoot raw then you can do this afterwards.

2) Choose a focus point and disable autofocus. Having an object half in focus and half out is never going to stitch well - so going manual ensures that every object is the same in each shot.

3) Choose an exposure (aperture and shutter speed) and lock that. This will keep the exposure of each shot consistent - objects will be the same brightness in each shot and blending will be rarely required. One approach is to lock exposure on the brightest element of the seen so that nothing is blown-out but obviously that's not always desired. Sometimes you might even want to take some shots at multiple exposures and blend them in - like high-dynamic-range processing.

4) Eliminate filters such as polarising filters because their effect changes as the camera rotates relative to the sun.

Perhaps some of this is now totally unnecessary because when I started doing pano's options like blending were unheard of - but by the same token it's very quick and easy to do so I continue to do it. A little blending isn't going to be an issue but significant blending will most likely introduce posterisation and/or noise. And a camera on full auto will sometimes change exposure dramatically when you pan from a dark building to the bright sky behind it (for example).

The issue is not locking the exposure/locking whitebalance/disabling auto-focus its remembering to switch them back to normal when you are done!

Cheers,

Mark.
 
Chuck, I forgot to answer you on the settings :-)
sparky_mark said:
Hi,

1) Choose or preset a white balance and use that for all shots.
Obviously if you shoot raw then you can do this afterwards.
Click to expand...
Yup, did that... check!
sparky_mark said:
2) Choose a focus point and disable autofocus. Having an object
half in focus and half out is never going to stitch well - so going
manual ensures that every object is the same in each shot.
Click to expand...
Yup, did that... check! (was set to infinity at my distance... easy to verify if accidentally moved :-)
sparky_mark said:
3) Choose an exposure (aperture and shutter speed) and lock that.
This will keep the exposure of each shot consistent - objects will
be the same brightness in each shot and blending will be rarely
required. One approach is to lock exposure on the brightest
element of the seen so that nothing is blown-out but obviously
that's not always desired. Sometimes you might even want to take
some shots at multiple exposures and blend them in - like
high-dynamic-range processing.
Click to expand...
Yup, did that... check! I actually will shoot the corners and the center first and see what they look like. I will pick an average between them without blowing highlights.
sparky_mark said:
4) Eliminate filters such as polarising filters because their
effect changes as the camera rotates relative to the sun.
Click to expand...
Nah, I use the polarizer. Unless you are doing a 180 degree or grater, it should not be a problem. I used the B+W Circular Polarizer on this pano... it was fine. My angle or rotation was maybe 10 degrees tops? As long as you know how the polarizer works and you know your light angles, you can use it at will. The advice should be: BE CAREFUL when using polarizers with large sky scenics or 100 to 180 degree panos with sky in them. Also watch out for scenes involving large expanses of FLAT water.
sparky_mark said:
Perhaps some of this is now totally unnecessary because when I
started doing pano's options like blending were unheard of - but by
the same token it's very quick and easy to do so I continue to do
it. A little blending isn't going to be an issue but significant
blending will most likely introduce posterisation and/or noise.
And a camera on full auto will sometimes change exposure
dramatically when you pan from a dark building to the bright sky
behind it (for example).
Click to expand...
Yup, did that... check! I agree...
sparky_mark said:
The issue is not locking the exposure/locking
whitebalance/disabling auto-focus its remembering to switch them
back to normal when you are done!
Click to expand...
Oh you;re so right... but I stopped doing that back in the dark ages. I think is more of an beginner than a pro who does it... but I SOMETIMES still forget... But, only on long shooting days where I change scenes a lot. I ALWAYS reset all back to my preferences in the morning of a shoot. I also have a backup bank in my D2Xs ready to go in case I mess up. Gotta love the backup option in the D2Xs :-))
sparky_mark said:
Cheers,

Mark.
Click to expand...
Thanks Mark.
--
Manny
http://www.pbase.com/gonzalu/
http://www.mannyphoto.com/
FCAS Member - http://manny.org/FCAS
 
Talking about perspective control and view cameras, has anybody used this PanoShift adapter?

http://www.zoerk.com/pages/p_psa.htm

It seems a better idea than the Nikon 85mm PC since you can use it on any lens (I guess) and the 85 is kind of long. You lose autofocus, but the same applies to the 85.

Has anybody used this?

Thanks,

C
 
gonzalu said:


I hate messing with perspective and distort because it screws
around with actual image data thereby damaging the initial image.
Given that it has already been stretched a bit by the stitching
tools, I don;t like it even more.

I think that I could probably do more with it in PTGui before final
blending... We'll see. This little test for you took my PC about 1
hour to do it on the full size image. The cost CPU-wise is great. I
may or may not do it depending on the final intent.
Click to expand...
Oh my goodness! I didn't mean for you to spend so many
cycles on it. So sorry. When I'm working with really
big panos, I always do all my experiments on little versions
until I'm certain I have something I like. My machine is
even slower than yours.

Yes, this stuff is hard to get to look good. The first instinct
with a keystoned image is to squeeze the bottom to align
it. This seems better than widening the top, because that
way you aren't fabricating data, just compressing it. Of course,
compression loses data, but it seems safer than inventing it.

The problem with that is that the proportions will be off. For
example, in your picture, the tower would loom very, very
high, much higher than it really was. You also lose part of
the width on the bottom if you do it that way.

That means a comromise of some sort much be worked out.
I played around a bit with your image (you don't want to
know how long) and I think this is one that I like best, or
at perhaps rather dislike least. I hope you don't mind me
showing you what I meant:



Mostly I widened the top to preserve the bottom, then pulled
at it a bit to fix the proportions. I also tried to make the tower
go straight up and down in the center. That is, bisect the tower
vertically and make that perpendicular to a flat ground so it isn't
doing the Leaning Tower of Pisa thing the way it somewhat
was to start with. I also widened the left-hand side a little bit
because that part was also dwindling. It's not too bad, but
it's still imperfect: the left spike of the tower isn't quite at
the same level as the right spike. It's that way in yours, too.

I arrived at this only after about 5 different kinds of unappealing
treatments. Given how much trouble you took for the shot
to get the detail, it seems a crime to do anything that would
reduce that for you. Oh, you might have an acceptable smaller
print, but for getting a big one made, I wouldn't want to see
you distorting anything too much, because it would make you
unhappy to lose part of your photo--and I don't blame you
one bit about that, either.

Really I was just inquiring whether I was being overly sensitive
in my own work to perspective matters. I'm always fiddling
architecture shots to get them not to be leaning and skewed.
But then I open up a newspaper and find it full shots where
they can't even get the horizon level. I didn't mean for you
to waste a bunch of time on such a lame question.

--tom
 
and learn from each other... at least I am.

i also use the small version tricks... but, I find it that if I get a great result, I will never reproduce it again, so I always work on the largest/best image and then down-sample at the very end :-)

Yes, indeed the corrections are always hard without the inherent knowledge of what the subject SHOULD look like. I was simply experimenting , not doing it solely because of you but to experiment and to continue a discussion ... no sweat.

I rather do the perspective correction in the Pano software that way the stitch happens at the same time as the warping stage. ONE SINGLE twist and data manipulation... whereas if I do it in PSCS2, I am doing it twice... once in PTGui (it has to warp anyway) and then in PSCS to get the final perspective.

In PTGui is simple enough... although it is painstaking moving the data around when your machine is as fast as mine :-) P4 3.4GHz used to be fast at some point. Now it is just mediocre LOL.
--
Manny
http://www.pbase.com/gonzalu/
http://www.mannyphoto.com/
FCAS Member - http://manny.org/FCAS
 
I've catch this explanation from a Spanish forum. Sorry, it's in Spanish. I hope you can read Spanish, at this moment I don't fancy to translate it.

"La imagen digital más grande del mundo

Tiene 2,5 Gigapíxeles y fueron necesarios cinco potentes ordenadores trabajando durante tres días para mostrar íntegramente y con todo lujo de detalles la ciudad holandesa de Delft y sus alrededores. La imagen muestra una panorámica de la ciudad pero con una resolución que permite observar y disfrutar de los mas sorprendentes detalles: desde la hora que marca el reloj de la iglesia de Delft (las tres y cinco de la tarde), situado a más de tres kilómetros de la cámara, los tejados cubiertos de arena y grava, los radios de una bicicleta que circula a cientos de metros, o comprobar si los trabajadores de una obra situada a varios kilómetros de la cámara llevan puesto el casco obligatorio. También se puede observar, por ejemplo, el edificio del Ministerio de Salud ubicado en La Haya, a 18 kilómetros. Para confeccionarla, Los fotógrafos subieron al edificio más alto de la ciudad (108 m. de altura), colocaron la cámara en un trípode y fotografiaron cada palmo de la ciudad. Utilizaron una Nikon D1x y un potente teleobjetivo de 400 milímetros, ayudados por un motor controlado por un ordenador que cambiaba el plano cada siete segundos. En total, una hora y doce minutos para obtener 600 instantáneas. Después, cinco potentes ordenadores trabajaron durante tres días para unirlas y obtener la fotografía digital más grande del mundo (2,5 gigapixels), con un tamaño en bytes de 6 Gigas. Han tenido que inventar un nuevo formato para poderla guardar, ya que el formato TIF no podía con tanto píxel.En caso de imprimirla, saldría una foto de dos metros de alto por seis de largo. Los miembros del Departamento de Imagen y Tratamiento de Datos del Instituto NTO han batido el récord que el norteamericano Max Lyons estableció justo hoy hace un año. Entonces, Lyons superó por primera vez la barrera del megapíxel con una imagen del Parque Nacional Bryce Canyon en Utah. Este fotógrafo usó la misma técnica que los holandeses. Tomó 196 fotos con una cámara digital de seis megapíxeles y después las unió. La foto puede verse en internet y gracias al visor Flash incorporado podéis, jugando con el zoom, disfrutar viendo cada detalle de la vida de esta ciudad. Más información. http://www.tpd.tno.nl/smartsite966.html "

José Luis (Spain)
 
Combo... I'm going with my brother and the main point is for me to shoot. We are going to hit a national park each year. This year it’s the Grand Canyon (my last time was in 2000, well before I had a DSLR). Last year was Yellowstone and Grand Teton NP.

I did look at your sequence. I was so impressed with how yours turned out; I jumped on the site and purchased it!

I just had to give it a try and took a simple set of handheld shots of the Tetons from just north of the Jackson airport. I think it was a simple left to right sequence of about 16 shots. I usually shoot RAW+Basic JPG on my D70, so I took the unprocessed low quality JPGs and ran it through the software. It was so easy. I can't wait to give it a real workout with my D200! Thank you!

Not an impressive pano, but it did a wonderful job of blending (yes, I mistakenly left the polarizer on and you can see the banding in the sky - lesson learned). Keep in mind that I used the lowest quality JPGs to make this...



...a full size image can be seen here...

http://www.pbase.com/csimet/image/74023025/original

--
  • Chuck
http://www.pbase.com/csimet
 
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