Stitching - An Advanced Approach

[dwswager]

The desire to stitch (for me) is driven by a desire to get more data with which to do a larger 300dpi print.

Camera	MP	X Pixels	Y Pixels	Width "	Height "
Canon 5D3	22	5760	3840	19	12
Nikon D810	36	7360	4912	24	16
Pentaz 645Z	51	8256	6192	27	20
Phase One IQ260	60	8984	6732	30	22
Phase One IQ280	80	10328	7760	34	25

If I'm putting something up on the wall, my goal is to have the image be at least 36" wide. The IQ280 is close enough that I'd probably be happy with that but as an amateur, such equipment is not in my hands. That then leaves stitching which works most of the time. When it doesn't work is when there's too much motion - waves in water are the worst, following by quickly moving clouds and trees. Which reminds me of something I'd like to see in LR...

As an admitted pixel peeper, I feel ya.  However, this is a limitation of the print process and our anal retentiveness.  You can make spectacular 36" prints with 22 or 36MPs.  But, yeah, if your looking from 6" away, you can see missing detail.  At that point, photography as science has overtaken and photography as Art doesn't see the light of day. 

[Ligament]

Bernard, thanks for sharing. I've been leery of stitching images with moving objects, particularly water in this example. Do you have any tips or guidelines when stitching images containing water? My fear of course is the stitching software would make a mess of such objects...

I thought I'd share two recent example combining DoF stacking and stitching.



D810 + Otus 55mm f1.4.



D810 + Leica 180mm f2.8 APO.

Cheers,
Bernard

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

Bernard, thanks for sharing. I've been leery of stitching images with moving objects, particularly water in this example. Do you have any tips or guidelines when stitching images containing water? My fear of course is the stitching software would make a mess of such objects...

Hi,

It depends a lot on the blending engine that's used to blend the image tiles in the overlap zones. It usually is not a big problem, the blending software usually knows how to select the seams that are already very close to identical in both image tiles. A good Pano stitcher also allows to use alternative blending engines, such as Enblend, or SmartBlend.

Things like wavecrests require a bit of timing when shooting, and in the few cases that the blending engine cannot find a good enough solution, we can use Layered output, and manually blend by warping the overlap zones a bit.

Cheers,
Bart

[Oldfox]

Do you have any tips or guidelines when stitching images containing water?

I use PTGUI and layers. Manual blending (using masks) is easy and in most cases you cannot see then blend. Here is one example. (There are other problems with this image but thats another story...)