My dear friends,
Some panorama fun.
It has been my opinion for quite some time that the most significant progress in photography these past few years have been made in software.
Although PTgui is not perfect, I have been a major fan of the application thanks to the steady release of valuable features we have seen.
The priority for me when taking panos is to minimize the number of frames required to get a given result, often a very high resolution image with a lot of DoF and enough natural looking DR.
Assuming you shoot for a 3 row pano with 7 images per row, assuming also that you need 3 different points of focus to get enough DoF, and assuming that you need to take images at 2 different speeds to get enough DR, you would end up with having to shoot 126 images to capture the following high res pano:
This is where PTgui comes into play. It was able to stitch a 4.5 GB layered output of this image using only 35 images... one row on top with infinity focus, and 2 rows with adequate focus for the medium and bottom parts of the image, each of those 2 at 2 exposure settings...
These is of course still a need to pick carefully the focus point of each of the rows and to spend a few hours on the layered file to make sure that the full potential is tapped into, but this is very manageable.
Cheers,
Bernard