Help With Distortion on a huge HDR Panoramic

Hey I took a panorama a week or so ago and finally got the HDR and stitching to a point that I'm satisfied.

It was 26 brackets of 3 pictures taken in portrait mode by my Rebel T3i with the 55-250 IS lens @ 200mm., combined to an HDR with SNS-HDR Lite and stitched with Photoshop.

The initial stitches did not turn out well when I tried to stitch all 26 at once. So what I did was combined 6 at a time excluding the two outer most images. This left me with 4 stitched sections and 2 outside sections which I then stitched again in Photoshop.

The result is a very high resolution sharp image with no noticeable stitching or HDR artifacts at high zooms. A little bit of noise but I can take care of that.

The problem I'm facing now is the distortion on the shoreline from taking so many pictures with the camera not quite being perfectly level with the horizon.

Using sliders in Lightroom I'm not having much luck eliminating the distortion on the shoreline. Can anyone suggest a program or method for fixing this? Feel free to take a shot at it as well

Here is the result of the stitch straight from photoshop:





Here is the un-distorted final crop I'm looking to get:
http://panamapat.smugmug.com/gallery/19821172_fL58r5#1568067362_2qNpLsc-A-LB

Here was what happened when I tried to stitch all 26 at once if anyone is interested:

I didn't see your final line before straightening the shoreline with Edit/Transform/Warp in CS5:-

Smitty2k1 said:

Here is the un-distorted final crop I'm looking to get:
http://panamapat.smugmug.com/...llery/19821172_fL58r5#1568067362_2qNpLsc-A-LB

Click to expand...

Below it is the version to exactly match the picture in your required cropped output, but I don't think that's really what you want at all, is it?

Anyway, the method is the same in either case but I had to perform slight rotation to match the required cropped version.





Cheers, Tony.

Smitty2k1 said:

Using sliders in Lightroom I'm not having much luck eliminating the distortion on the shoreline. Can anyone suggest a program or method for fixing this? Feel free to take a shot at it as well

Click to expand...

CS5 warp tool. Just a 2 min stab, can be made perfectly straight:

Smitty2k1 said:

Here was what happened when I tried to stitch all 26 at once if anyone is interested:

Click to expand...

Yes, I am. Did you try throwing the whole lot at Microsoft ICE - the free panorama assembler? For simple shots (not 360 3Ds) it's amazing and will certainly produce less inter image abruptness.

Cheers, Tony.

Here is my quick try using the warp tool in PSPX4 to correct the curvature and the alignment tool to straighten the horizon. Used the Flaming Pear Flood plugin and blended the result in with the original to fill the blank spaces in the water. Also did a little color enhancing. As I view it here, it looks like it could also use a little Topaz Adjust and/or some usm with possibly some added contrast.



Regards...Allen

Or, you could try stitching in Microsoft ICE or AutoPano which have simple tools to precisely fix the orientation.

If you try ICE give the "File: New Structured Panorama ..." option a try which should work well in this case.
--
Matt Uyttendaele
blog: http://hdview.wordpress.com/
twitter: http://twitter.com/@MicrosoftICE