Not sure if this is the right place to post this, but I can't seem to find another forum that seems appropriate.
Tomorrow night I am joing a group of photographers here in San Diego to do a sunset of the SD skyline. Among other things I want to try to do some panoramas of the city. I will use my D2X to take the pictures and try stitching them together in Photoshop CS2. Can anyone give me some guidelines for setting up my camera and lens for this shoot. For example:
- Manual focus or auto
- White balance auto or other
- Exposure on manual or one of the auto settings?
- How to level the camera and lens?
Since I have never done this before any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
Exposure, white balance, and focus should be kept the same for each shot you're going stitch. The easiest way to ensure this is by putting all of them in manual mode. Auto Exposure can be particularly damaging because the camera bases its decision on averaging out what's in the frame; and if the scene content changes significantly from one frame to the next you can end up with substantially different exposures. Auto WB can be equally damaging if shooting JPG, but with RAW you always have the option to change the WB later.
Today's 3rd party pano programs are getting better at using blend techniques to compensate for slight differences in exposure, or distortion, vignetting, etc. But they can only do so much, and any "repair" work the stitcher has to do can be detrimental to the image quality.
Same thing goes for leveling. Sure you can straighten out the final image after stitching, but the more off-level it is, the more you're going to have to crop to get rid of any empty canvas space. This could mean cropping out something you didn't want to crop out. So if you're not absolutely sure your base is level you might want to give your composition some breathing room.
PTGui is an excellent program, and used to be my preferred stitcher. The most recent version of Autopano Pro surpasses it IMHO, so that's what I mostly use now especially if I'm going to have to combine bracketed exposures. Either program is very capable though, and both will produce far better results than CS2's merge tool (which can't do any blending and will often leave visible seams across even-toned areas such as the sky). I've heard CS3's stitcher is better at alignment, but I'm still not sure if it has any blending capabilities. Both AutoPano Pro and PTGui have demo versions available for you to try, although they watermark the stitched images (Autopano does anyway, can't remember if PTGuid does).
My preference is to get the source images as perfect as possible so that the stitching software has an easy job. To that end I use dedicated panoramic gear that helps ensure I get a level rotation around the lens' optical center to avoid not only leveling problems but also parallax error. If panos are something you want to get serious about, you might want to check out the Really Right Stuff website to see some of the
gear available. They also have a
tutorial available that explains some of the concepts involved. You may not need to get too deep into all this for a simple horizontal pano of a distant skyline, but if you ever decide you want to start doing vertical and/or multi-row panos, or panos that have both foreground and distant objects in the frame, these concepts and tools can be very helpful.
