What Panorama Software/Hardware?

jmphotocraft · February 9, 2010

Every now and then I see a stitched pano that just looks totally seamless. How is this done? Is a pano tripod head required? Or just better software? Both? I'm using the Canon PhotoStitch software now that just came with the camera. It does a decent job, but I can always see seams - sometimes subtle, sometimes not.

cab.in.boston · February 9, 2010

jmphotocraft wrote:

Every now and then I see a stitched pano that just looks totally seamless. How is this done? Is a pano tripod head required? Or just better software? Both? I'm using the Canon PhotoStitch software now that just came with the camera. It does a decent job, but I can always see seams - sometimes subtle, sometimes not.

I don't know about software, but I've heard really good things about the Really Right Stuff pano gear.

craig_d · February 9, 2010

jmphotocraft wrote:

Every now and then I see a stitched pano that just looks totally seamless. How is this done? Is a pano tripod head required? Or just better software? Both? I'm using the Canon PhotoStitch software now that just came with the camera. It does a decent job, but I can always see seams - sometimes subtle, sometimes not.

I use a free program called Hugin that you can download online (Google will turn it up for you). I have sometimes shot panos from a tripod, but usually I just shoot them hand-held and try to move like a tripod

-- it generally works. Hugin does a good job of aligning images and correcting for perspective and vignetting. It helps if you manually add lots of matching points between adjacent images.

pathfinder · February 9, 2010

All I use is CS4's Pano merging menu.

It is important when shooting panos, to put your camera in Manual mode, so that the exposure does not vary from frame to frame. Shooting in Av or Auto will cause the exposure to vary a bit from frame to frame.

When shooting with wider angle lenses, pano gear can help a lot. If you are shooting mild tele lenses, pano gear is less needed - a bit. I shoot a number drive by panos hand held - but always in Manual Mode with the AF turned off ( unless I forget to turn AF off)

Here is one of those drive by hand held panos - 8 0r 10 frames if memory serves

Here is another handheld of ~10 frame pano, shot of jpgs in a hurry - heresy I say!! - Garden of the Gods at sunset

Foques · February 9, 2010

CS3 photomerge utility.

craig_d · February 9, 2010

pathfinder wrote:

All I use is CS4's Pano merging menu.

It is important when shooting panos, to put your camera in Manual mode, so that the exposure does not vary from frame to frame. Shooting in Av or Auto will cause the exposure to vary a bit from frame to frame.

When shooting with wider angle lenses, pano gear can help a lot. If you are shooting mild tele lenses, pano gear is less needed - a bit. I shoot a number drive by panos hand held - but always in Manual Mode with the AF turned off ( unless I forget to turn AF off)

These are good points. I never shoot panos with wide-angle lenses because turning the camera alters the perspective too radically. Good pano software can correct for this, but the price you pay is a loss of sharpness -- and most wide-angle lenses aren't that sharp toward the corners to begin with. I typically use 50mm or longer (FF) when shooting panos.

jmphotocraft · February 9, 2010

craig_d wrote:

I typically use 50mm or longer (FF) when shooting panos.

I was wondering about that. I'll just be doing single-row panos for a while to start, so I was thinking a 50mm prime would be best, but then I thought maybe 35mm to get more vertical range in portrait orientation. Your thoughts?

craig_d · February 9, 2010

jmphotocraft wrote:

I was wondering about that. I'll just be doing single-row panos for a while to start, so I was thinking a 50mm prime would be best, but then I thought maybe 35mm to get more vertical range in portrait orientation. Your thoughts?

35's not that much wider than 50 (especially on APS-C), so you should be fine.

I've done double and triple-row panos using 50mm. It's time-consuming to get it right (mostly in the stitching) but not really difficult.

mutti_wilson · February 9, 2010

I use Autostitch. Free and super easy to use.

http://www.photo-freeware.net/autostitch.php

jmphotocraft · February 9, 2010

craig_d wrote:

35's not that much wider than 50 (especially on APS-C), so you should be fine.

I use a 5DII.

ziggy53 · February 9, 2010

While a panoramic head is not absolutely required fpr stitched panoramic images, it does eliminate much of the parallax error that occurs from trying to stitch images shot from a rotation other that the optic center of a given lens, often called the "nodal point" of the lens (although it's not perfectly accurate to use that term for this purpose, but it's common parlance.) This is most important if you have foreground elements close to the camera position. If everything in the scene is at a considerable distance, it's not as important.

It is also relatively vital to keep the images level as tilted images will reduce the usable area of the resulting stitched panorama.

The RRS panoramic system that Cab mentioned is indeed very nice and given your listed equipment probably a very good choice for you.

Good software includes Autopano Pro (possibly the best overall choice) and, if you use Windows, freeware combinations like Autopano-SIFT and Hugin. While the latter is freeware the resulting quality can be very nice, but it is largely manual control and time consuming.

Using manual exposure is absolutely vital and if the lighting changes between image acquision, you might have to start over. Blending dissimilar exposures is frustrating.

Do check out the best panoramic thread ever:

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=101529

Results:

http://dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=990541&postcount=274
http://dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=994328&postcount=293

Be sure to see what Baldy did here:

http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=1039964&postcount=362
http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=1039966&postcount=363

jmphotocraft · February 9, 2010

Thanks Ziggy, good info.

Man, just tried CS3 Photomerge for the first time - wow! This is a lot better than what Canon PhotoStitch was coming up with... not bad for being on a moving chairlift...

David_S85 · February 9, 2010

I made a little tutorial about proper alignment of shots with a panoramic head a while back. Might be of help.

Scott_Quier · February 10, 2010

In addition to the manual exposure control (SS, aperture, ISO) mentioned by Ziggy, you also want to ensure you (1) shoot RAW, and (2) a tip I learned from Marc Muench ... select a WB other than AWB.

It can often happen when you used AWB that the WB selected by the camera will change from one frame to the next. This makes getting a consistant WB across all the frames quite difficult (DAMHIK).

And, since you are shooting RAW, it doesn't matter what WB you use, as long as it's the same across all the frames. This way, you adjust the WB in post for one frame and you can use the exact same WB adjustment for all of them.

craig_d · February 10, 2010

Scott_Quier wrote:

In addition to the manual exposure control (SS, aperture, ISO) mentioned by Ziggy, you also want to ensure you (1) shoot RAW, and (2) a tip I learned from Marc Muench ... select a WB other than AWB.

It can often happen when you used AWB that the WB selected by the camera will change from one frame to the next. This makes getting a consistant WB across all the frames quite difficult (DAMHIK).

And, since you are shooting RAW, it doesn't matter what WB you use, as long as it's the same across all the frames. This way, you adjust the WB in post for one frame and you can use the exact same WB adjustment for all of them.

That makes no sense. If you're shooting RAW, it doesn't matter what WB is set in the camera. Your last paragraph would be correct if you removed "as long as it's the same across all the frames." If you set WB in PP for the first frame and apply the same WB settings to the other frames, then it doesn't matter what the original camera-recommended WB was in the other frames.

Scott_Quier · February 10, 2010

craig_d wrote:

That makes no sense. If you're shooting RAW, it doesn't matter what WB is set in the camera. Your last paragraph would be correct if you removed "as long as it's the same across all the frames." If you set WB in PP for the first frame and apply the same WB settings to the other frames, then it doesn't matter what the original camera-recommended WB was in the other frames.

I do believe you're right. I know when I first heard this it made sense to me. Now, after thinking about it more, it doesn't seem so.

pathfinder · February 10, 2010

The real trick about WB, is that in ACR ( Adobe Camera Raw convertor ) you highlight all the frames for your pano at the same time, and synch the processing of each and every frame in ACR, so that they each get the same WB, exposure, fill, black point, sharpening, chromatic aberration correction. THEN do your Photo merge.

You're right Scott, Marc gets credit for teaching that to us all at the Shoot outs in the fall.

I think Scott's point about an actual Sun or Shade, rather than AWB, is more true if you are shooting jpgs to merge, rather than RAW files. I do shoot jpgs this way sometimes, when I am shooting snapshots that I plan to merge for one big snapshot. Shooting RAW is better if your goal is fine art quality, but sometimes, I am just shooting snapshots, and jpgs merge nicely for panos IF you shoot in Manual mode, with AF turned off, and WB specified as Scott said.

If you shoot RAW, you can specify WB to synch in ACR

Scott_Quier · February 10, 2010

AF turned off - I knew I was forgetting something!

And, just for fun ... here's a pano I made in 2008 with an IR-converted 20D with EF 50mm f/1.4 @ f/4. Hand-held, 14 exposures in portrait orientation, and stitched in CS3. I was sitting on some rocks and rotating my body at my waist, and using the focus points (aligned with the shoreline) to keep the panning on the same level. Worked pretty well.

jnsuffolk · February 10, 2010

how much overlap
How much overlap does everyone use when doing panos. I usually do them by hand myself. and was just curious. 6 shots or so give me a 12 by 36 anymore and I'll go broke on the frame.

craig_d · February 10, 2010

jnsuffolk wrote:

How much overlap does everyone use when doing panos.

Close to 50%.

ziggy53 · February 10, 2010

jnsuffolk wrote:

How much overlap does everyone use when doing panos. I usually do them by hand myself. and was just curious. 6 shots or so give me a 12 by 36 anymore and I'll go broke on the frame.

It partly depends on the lens that you use and the amount of vertical space you can afford to lose.

Lenses with a lot of curvilinear distortion will need to be adjusted for the distortion to properly overlap and that results in "humps" which you generally crop away from the final presentation image. So for lenses with much curvilinear distortion you need more overlap than for better geometrically corrected lenses.

DeeCajun · March 10, 2010

I would like to try doing a pano, and I have a MacBook Pro..

i don't want to spend a fortune on software or hardware, any suggestions?

I tried the Hugin app, which didn't work.

jmphotocraft · March 10, 2010

DeeCajun wrote:

I would like to try doing a pano, and I have a MacBook Pro..

i don't want to spend a fortune on software or hardware, any suggestions?

I tried the Hugin app, which didn't work.

Canon Photostitch is decent, if you have a Canon it came with it. If you have Photoshop CS3 or 4, the Photomerge tool works even better. It might even be in Photoshop Elements, I don't know. I did this with Photomerge, and I shot it hand-held from a moving chairlift. It is significantly better than the version that Canon Photostitch cobbled together. 7 vertical shots:

ziggy53 · March 10, 2010

DeeCajun wrote:

I would like to try doing a pano, and I have a MacBook Pro..

i don't want to spend a fortune on software or hardware, any suggestions?

I tried the Hugin app, which didn't work.

Kolor Autopano Pro is pretty good stuff.

See what our Baldy did using it on a Mac:

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=1039966

DeeCajun · March 14, 2010

I tried the demo version of Autopano.. its very good! thank you, I may have to purchase!

Baldy · April 28, 2011

DeeCajun wrote: »

I tried the demo version of Autopano.. its very good! thank you, I may have to purchase!

I do a few stitches now and then with ptgui, but I keep coming back to Autopano
for most of the stitches I do.

We just hung a 40-foot wide print, 80-inches high, made from 300 shots, of Prague on a snowy morning and
AutopanoPro 2.5 just mowed through it like buttah. It was tough because there were boats moving down the river,
people walking across bridges, cars moving, etc., and it somehow de-ghosted the whole thing almost perfectly.

Here's the toughest stitch I've ever done. The camera was hand-held, players were running around the bases, the
crowd was insane, it was 6 shots, and yet....who would have thought Autopano could stitch this? We made a couch-
sized print of it:

(Actually, our print was from a later version where the grass wasn't so over-saturated.
Bigger size of this one: http://www.onedgephoto.com/Smugmug/SmugMug-Office-V20-Possible/15358525_wENjp#1160247194_7YvTT-O-LB )

ziggy53 · April 28, 2011

Baldy wrote: »

...

Here's the toughest stitch I've ever done. The camera was hand-held, players were running around the bases, the
crowd was insane, it was 6 shots, and yet....who would have thought Autopano could stitch this? We made a couch-
sized print of it:

...

Pretty amazing!

clap

Baldy · April 28, 2011

ziggy53 wrote: »

Pretty amazing! clap

Thanks! It's funny, if you look on the third base line, there's a runner preparing to score, but as you look to the right the huge monitor shows him having already crossed the plate, because that frame was taken later.

Autopano and ptgui let you make HDR panos too, either by stitching into separate layers for each exposure so you can feed the result into your fav HDR software, or by doing the HDR themselves (I haven't tried that).

Foques · May 2, 2011

Baldy, I just tried the Autopano today. wow! I really do like the software! thank you!

oakfieldphotography.com · May 6, 2011

Excuse me for being ignorant but whenever i put my 5dmk2 into manual mode my exposure jumps all over the scale when i am doing panos. I tried it in Programme mode and i think i let the camera make too many decisions for me. I dont want to take from this tread but can anyone help me please?

Regards
Patrick:D

ziggy53 · May 6, 2011

oakfieldphotography.com wrote: »

Excuse me for being ignorant but whenever i put my 5dmk2 into manual mode my exposure jumps all over the scale when i am doing panos. I tried it in Programme mode and i think i let the camera make too many decisions for me. I dont want to take from this tread but can anyone help me please?

Regards
Patrick:D

Manual exposure mode is best. As with any photograph you have to decide on a subject and then expose for the subject.

If the overall scene dynamic range is beyond a single exposure then use multiple exposures and HDR or manual tone blending to combine each frame's exposures before stitching together for the panorama. As long as you are consistent with your process you should be able to make a convincing overlap.

What Panorama Software/Hardware?

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