Call for interest in Panorama photography

Rich,
I was reading the Retouching forum and there is a new freeeeee pano prog. Yeah, I know, whats the name. Well I don't remember. Have to go hunt. Works like a dream.

I would like to try a pano.
I think done right they are beautiful.

cheers
Gale

 

Rich
I got lucky :>)))

It is called auto stitch. The zip file is 1 mg. I could email it to you. Then if you want to you could do a search on the retouching forum for a long thread on it.

cheers
gale

 

AutoStitch it is. I worked on it about an hour ago and it works like a charm

http://www.autostitch.net/

 

Waaalaaa Jay,

Do you have the latest version. Just did a serch on dpreview and found an up date.

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1006&message=11557442

You may already have it.

Thanks
Gale

 

Rich and Jay,

great thread here on the autostitch.

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1006&message=11898139

cheers
gale

 

Panoramas, etc

Hi,

I did a small project for the Kora Shriners here in Maine. You can check it out at http://KoraShriners.org The dining hall has a series of murals on the wall. The lighting there is horrible and it's hard to shoot them without distortion, but we pulled it off. Each mural has a hot spot that goes to a higher res JPG of the image with an explanation of what it is. The doors on one end of the hall are a hot spot that leads to the next floor where the ceremonial hall is. If anybody is interested in doing these things, don't hesitate to contact me. I use a D-70 and the standard issue 18-70 lens that came with it.

 

Rich :


I've used Panavue Image Assembler and Panorama Factory at various times. I need to digitally stitch together photos of equipment in chemical plants/refineries quite often, and I've found either of these to be useful. PIA is good for multiple rows and columns, while PF does a little better job with extreme fisheye/WA effects. Each one can be smoothly added to the workflow without undue effort (usually).

When I was in Salt Lake City last week, I was given an evening tour of the LDS Convention Center (posts to come in the Architecture forum on that one - a fascinating and imposing place), and I was shown a room with paintings depicting various scenes from the Book of Mormon. I quickly swung the camera around and shot two photos at 12mm, which I've then stitched together in PF.



It's not perfect, to be sure (and will be shrunk way down for display here), but the software works pretty well. Fixing the inevitable distortions for stitching together images has some serious limits (I use Lensdoc for that), and it's sometimes better to leave artifacts like the ceiling beams with some optical arch effects. I wish I'd placed myself just a couple of feet over to get a better centring of the photos, but that's done.

I also used PF to join images for the photo I posted yesterday over in Architecture (https://www.nikoncafe.com//forums/viewtopic.php?t=1148). My colleague just told me the prior sets I shot (https://www.nikoncafe.com//forums/viewtopic.php?t=380) were used for submission to an NM competition which he won for in two categories. So, while PIA and PF are not the highest end of software for panoramic or stitching exercises, I guess they can suffice !

I'd post some of the 4 X 5 matrix shots I've stitched for my work using PIA, but they're proprietary processes and the clients would be a touch aggrieved with me for publication. Suffice to say that with reasonable care, even without a leveled panoramic mount on a tripod and shooting handheld, matrix stitches are also very possible.


John P.

 

Rich :

Thanks for the compliment, but I'm still annoyed at my poor placement to better bisect the room for the two shots... I had a very nice and pleasant senior member of the church giving me the tour, and I didn't want to be rude and keep shooting while he stood by. He was very supportive of my photography, however, and took me to some marvelous vantage points that the average visitor might not reach. He also took the time to explain a number of aspects of LDS that I was unfamiliar with, although I don't believe that I will be making a change in that direction.

.....

Some of the credit for the (relatively) clean stitch falls to Panorama Factory. One can specify the camera and lens used for photos (including a specific or estimated FL), and this seems to allow for better results. I heartily recommend the package (http://www.panoramafactory.com/) for the photographer who wants to perform linear stitches (one row or column only) and who doesn't want to try and master another arcane art of software. It gets regular updates, is reasonably priced, and doesn't require me to study for another doctorate to understand it.

Panavue Image Assembler (http://www.panavue.com) was extremely good, but it's not been recently updated, and needs some tending. However, PIA will stitch together a matrix of photos, which PF will not; and additionally, will stitch together images of odd sizes, where PF needs to have equally sized images. PIA still gets very regular use from me.

As for a separate section on panoramic shots and software, I'm of two minds. I use these approaches as technical tools for my day-to-day work, so I'm probably a bit jaded by the constant efforts. OTOH, I wonder how many people have explored these tools in any depth ? It could be an area of interest as people's knowledge increases.

There used to be an extremely good site for discussion of these products at http://www.panoguide.com/, but they seem to have dropped that aspect of the site. Pity, because I thought it was about the most objective of the review sites on this subject.



John P.

 

AutoStitch really works good

Here's a 9 shot hand held panorama of Bernard Lake in Alaska. I just loaded the shots into AutoStitch and it did all the rest of the work.

Click on the thumbnail for the larger file. This one is just as it was stitched, slighty cropped, with no other PS adjustments. It was taked early in the morning, thus the wide range of color of the sky from left to right.




Chet

 

If you use either a Mac or PC, Stitcher by RealViz.com will do either cubic or cylindrical panoramas. Cylindrical panoramas can be printed. With the setup I use, I shoot 12 vertical images in a circle and then stitch them. By rendering them as QTVRA (QuickTime Virtual Reality Authoring) they can be viewed with QuickTime. With the viewer, you can zoom in and pan or tilt on the images in or out to the parameters set by the author. Stitcher costs about $450 and they allow you to install it on a laptop and one desktop machine. It's cross platform. Some of the lower end programs will work fine, but don't have the features such as distortion correction and equalization of exposure in images. It is very important that you insure that your camera's 'film' plane is perpendicular to the axis of rotation and that the nodal point of the lens is the center of rotation. Additionally, the overlap of the images should be at least 30%. More is better. When these programs take three images and stitch them together for a 360 degree panorama, a lot of resolution is lost.

In case I have told you more than you ever wanted to know, I'll shut up now........

Have a good one.

 

Panorama software, etc

Rich,

Take a squint at Kaidan.com and check out their hardware and some of the programs they sell. That's where I got all the stuff I use, except the tripod, ball head and Arca Swiss plates. I wanted to be able to whip that camera off the tripod or remove it from the panorama head without going through a ritual of unscrewing stuff. Works great. That carbon fiber tripod from China was a smart move. I haven't tested it in a nuclear waste dump or on the backside of Titan, but I am sure it will hold up for most of the things I want to do with it.

Panorama's that you can put on line are impressive as hell. As soon as my local yacht builder gets a boat nearer to completion, I'm going over there and shoot a couple with hot spots and all. They have a website and I think an interior panorama of one of their 'picnic boats' would be a good enhancement. Their website is http://www.lymanmorse.com/builders/lyman_morse.htm

A few years back I built their underwater railway to launch a $5,000,000 yacht. The builder used it once. The boat didn't fall off, so I went away paid and relieved..........

 

Hi guys,
do you have special tripod heads to shoot around the nodal point of your lens? I've read a lot of articles on how to eliminate the parallax effect, and it seems a special spherical head is needed. For landscapes, no need to do this because the objects are far away, but when shooting indoor, its hard to have a ghost-free image when using a ordinary tripod and rotating about your camera.

I'm looking for a good head to go with my D70, any recommendations ?

 

It's called Autostitch and I got the tip here on thie site from Gale. Here's an impressive, melancholy, very windy spot in northwest Ireland called Grianan of Aileach. It's a ring fort. It's desolate but beautiful at the same time. This software is sooooo easy!

Hi Rich,

Very nice Panaramas. I too think Autostitch is a good program and you can't beat the price. I think free! I also use a panarama program from Ulead which also does 360 degree. I have problems because I don't have a panarama head for the tripod so I have only done one and the stitching came out very nice.

Melissa