Panoramics

[pwc]

Does anyone have a really good setup or workflow they'd like to share regarding digital panoramas? I'm starting to get into it more and up until now use the stitch thingy from Photoshop (found in ZElements, but can be used in regular CS). It works well enough.

But they I made the mistake of reading some articles and crap, I KNOW I can do better.

I'd really liek to get the proper pano head for my tripod as I now understand how much more that would help, but it's a chunk of change. In the mean time I'm being more precise with how I rotate through a capture (rotating around roughly the middle of the lens rather than moving my body) and making sure overlaps are good. I've also started trying to figure out lens distortion and removing it before or after I do a stitch. Still haven't figured that one out.

Any hints or tricks that work well for you? And please, by all means, post some examples! If it's raining tomorrow, I should have something worth posting.

 

[DaktariEd]

Macintosh...program called "PhotoStitch."
Works like a charm...select the images and hit "go" basically...it does the basic work, you approve or move the crop lines, then save.

:sombrero:

 

[Tucson T4R]

Ulead Cool 360

I tried a trial version of Ulead Cool 360. It worked very well and I was able to make some cool panoramas from my roof that you could vurtualy pan around 360 degrees on your computer.

Check it out here: http://www.ulead.com/cool360/runme.htm

 

[Robthebrit]

Isn't 'photostitch' a Canon program? If we are talking about the same thing there is a PC version too. You can probably download it from Canon's website.

It does work very well even when the pictures don't line up too well. I it does an awesome job of correcting the perspective within each image.

Rob

 

[whipp]

Hugin

I use a program called Hugin with pretty good results, at least for my amateur attempts. It's available for OSX, windows, and a few unix platforms. Here's an example, click to see larger versions.

From the top of Tomichi Pass, in Colorado:


- Whipp

 

[DaktariEd]

Isn't 'photostitch' a Canon program? If we are talking about the same thing there is a PC version too. You can probably download it from Canon's website.

Rob

Yes, you're right. PhotoStitch is a Canon program I got w/my D60...worth trying.

This image is just three stitched together.
I've stitched as many as a dozen to make an extraordinarily HUGE 360˚ image out in the Serengetti.

 

[etbadger]

Another person here who uses software to simulate a wide angle lense.

I use http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html Autostitch, a free Windows 32 targeted program out of a CS department at the University of BC.

A couple examples (much shrunk from my originals):

London from the bank of the Thames. Built out of about 6pics from a small point & shoot.

Tripple divide in Glacier NP. 4 photos from a digital SLR.

Imogene Pass, CO. 3 photos from a digital SLR.

Paris, about 4 photos from a small point & shoot.


It also works well for when you enter a small room and can't get far enough back to get a good view in the lense vertically or horizontally.

-e

 

[pwc]

Thanks for the suggestions! I've tried a couple and here's what I found.

- Photostich that comes with Canon cameras
- Photomerge which comes with Elements and can be run in Photoshop CS
- Autostitch

Hands down Autostitch is the easy of use and best results winner.

Photostitch complained that some images contained too short of a focal length. Huh? Yes, they were shot at 16mm vertically with a full frame sensor for a REASON. I wanted all that info. So it's out of the picture if I can't use 16mm.

Photomerge, while giving you the ability to move things around, did a bad job in some areas where I went slow and had a lot of overlap to make sure detail was included. It lost not so much from instant results as from....

Autostitch does a great job of changing the images to match while compensating for the curve of the lens itself. This does make the crop area smaller sometimes but it keeps things in the right perspective. I'm really impressed with its results (simple test below) and am now working on tweaking its settings to increase quality.

I'll try the two suggested retail items as well when I get some time, but I want to get outside and enjoy the weather.

By the way, one trick I learned that helps a fair amount: Take a picture of your hand or before and after a set of photos. I use a thumbs up at the start and a flat hand (stop) at the end. This makes it easy to find sets when you are flipping through 1000 photos upon your return to home.

 

[etbadger]

Another trick that worked well for us with help from Autostitch was to take photos of pages in a map atlas book of France. After cropping to the map only (no margins), we threw the pics into Autostitch and ended up with a large image on the computer that had merged all the maps so that the roads meshed well. With our image viewer we could pan, zoom in and out, and generally get around France without the book (which was borrowed for an evening only anyway).

Much easier than using the map atlas and paging all around, plus you could then throw the image in Ozi Explorer or similar software for GPS nav.

Same principle works for taking a picture of a long tapestry in a hall. Just walk a few feet sideways, take a pic, rinse, repeat.

-e

 

[pwc]

that's a helluva good idea.

I tested Autostitch out later on a large swing set. I stood about 8' away of this thing that is 25' wide or so. I took them mostly in a pattern but then threw in some random shots from a different area. I got crazy at the end and started panning more left. It handled all 51 images perfectly and I do mean perfectly. I'm really impressed with how easy it is.

 

[pwc]

My additional 2 GB of RAM showed up yesterday and helps a lot. I did notice I can get Autostitch to die though. I have 3GB of RAM total. If I set Autostitich to use 1GB I notice the use will go as high as 1.5GB. If it gets to within about 90% of total capacity, it gives an out of memory error. If I throttle it back, or shut off other applications, it does ok. It's REAL nice having an application allow you to change the amount of RAM you want to use. I can now have two instances running at once set at 750MB of RAM and they are both happy and complete in a reasonable time.

Here's another crack at the Colorado/Canyonlands panorama. It's a little wider this time using 27 portrait framed images from a Canon 5D. Click on the image for a 22MB full size file.

 

[pwc]

Another from Utah, this time Arches National Park. Click here for full size image (warning 24MB). I'm loving Autostitch

 

[Robthebrit]

Those photos are fantastic.

I just played around with auto stitch, it is byfar the best of the tools that I have tried. The demo version of Autostitch only loads jpegs which is a pain, its tempting to buy one of the commercial versions so I can directly load raw files. Has anybody used/tried one of the commercial versions?

Rob