Creating Panoromas

[erick]

Had a need to stitch together separate images to create a panorama. Of course, I don't want to pay for sophisticated software! After a few false starts, I found this free software, Autostitch:-

http://cvlab.epfl.ch/~brown/autostitch/autostitch.html

Seems to do a satisfactory job for happy snaps. And processing time was quite reasonable, even setting the output size to 100%. Haven't played with all the other parameters as yet.

See attached stitch of 26 images taken in Werribee Gorge yesterday.

Yes, lots of things wrong - eq AWB and Autoexpose were on, so the balance between images wasn't right. I'm still experimenting to see if using a particular focal length gives a better result than other focal lengths, but the result looks much the same at 18, 24, 28, 35 and 50mm on my small zoom lens.

I'm happy :)

[[1ponders]]

Nicely done Eric. :thumbsup:

Yeah autostitch is a fav, been around for a while. Does a fantastic job for its simplicity. Getting exposures right is a bit of a challenge

[hotspur]

Great work Eric,that program has done a good job.

thanks for link.

Where exactly is this hill/mountain?

Cheers Chris

[erick]

Werribee Gorge is not too far west of Melbourne - about 15 min from me.

http://www.parkweb.vic.gov.au/1park_display.cfm?park=209

http://www.about-australia.com/travel-guides/victoria/macedon-ranges-spa-country/attractions/natural/werribee-gorge-state-park/

Another couple from there.

[Barrykgerdes]

Nice

I love making panoramas. Autostitch is very good. I use a program called The Panorama Factory I actually paid for some years ago that also does an excellent job.

The secret of getting good panoramas is to use a stable stand for the camera that allows swivelling through 360 degrees. Make sure there is nothing in the foreground that can cause double images and allow plenty of overlap. It can often be advantgeous to use the camera in portrait mode to increase vertical resolution. Wide angle lenses work better also.

I make panoramas principally for use in stellarium. This requires a lot of processing of the basic 360 degree panoramas to create an alpha layer with the sky made transparent then cutting it into panels to allow very high resolution. My panoramas usually are about 15000 pixels wide and clipped to 1024 pixels high.

Tom Bisque from Software Bisque helped me with the first one and he put it on the web page. They are too big to display on this page. The stellarium version I made much later can be downloaded from the Stellarium.org site.

Barry

[erick]

Thanks Barry. Yes, lots wrong with those first attempts. I was swivelling at the spine, handheld. But they were really to test out that software.

I did take a number of shots out west on a levelled tripod, set to allow Az motion only. I wanted a fairly accurate 360 deg horizon pano so I could study the site against the cardinal points later. Again, I should have thought about auto exposure and AWB - they did upset the interframe comparison.

You are right about being careful about the forground. I had a close tree in another and Autostitch generated a ghost of the tree in the pano. See below for a crop of the problem.

[RickS]

You need special gear that can rotate the camera around the no parallax point of the lens (or do it very carefully by hand) if you want to avoid ghosting effects on the foreground. There is a wide range of hardware available for panoramic photography from the cheap and cheerful to very expensive computerized gear.

Another free panorama stitcher is Hugin (http://hugin.sourceforge.net/). I use PTGUI which is very good, but not free.

Cheers,
Rick.

[Barrykgerdes]

Yes Ric. That is a very good point that I never thought of. Particularly when I was standing on the ridgecap hanging on like grim death with the camera held against the TV mast while I rotated it around the mast and taking 40 pictures. At My age even getting onto the roof was a major hazzard. I photo shopped the pictures to remove the offending images before combining.

Barry

[RickS]

In a situation like that you did well to just keep the camera steady and your underpants unsoiled, Barry :D

[Alchemy]

Great results, must download that program myself.... Nice link thankyou.

[mithrandir]

As long as you have a steady hand or something lean on a tripod often is not needed. Holding the camera to your eye and twisting from the waist, watching the overlap as you go, usually works.

If you have a bit of vertical overshoot, any cropping to produce straight edges should not cause any grief.

[OICURMT]

Agreed, I shoot a lot of hand-held panorama's and 360's. However, if you want some really awe inspiring pano's.. you'll have to get a tripod and have attention to detail (foreground objects, proper overlap etc...)

The master on this forum would have to be Alex. He shoots with a Nodal Ninja 5 pano-head. His site has some beauties...

My favorite is : http://www.terrastro.com/d.album/showimg.php?file=/03.Phillip%20Island/01.360%20Virtual%20Tour.mov :eyepop:
(http://www.terrastro.com/d.album/showimg.php?file=/03.Phillip%20Island/01.360%20Virtual%20Tour.mov)