Panorama Tools

I'll have a tutorial on this product in a few weeks.

Michael

[boku]

I'll have a tutorial on this product in a few weeks.

Michael

And if there were ever a piece of software that begged for a tutorial, Panorama Tools would be it.

[Alan Smallbone]

There are a lot of tutorials for panotools out on the net. I use it a lot and have been for many years, there are also different gui front ends that are available.

Gui's for PC:
Ptassembler  (shareware)
Ptgui  (shareware)
Hugin  (free - open source) (also Linux)

Mac
PtMac (shareware)

There are also several lists including a panotools list at yahoogroups.

Alan

[Wayne Jacobsen]

One more hint: polarizing filters don't work well.  I believe this is because the polarizing effect varies accoring to the angle of the lens and the sun; when you turn the camera to take the next shot, the angle changes.  Whatever the reason, if you use a polarizer, the sky is likely to be darker in some shots than others.

--Wayne

[BryanHansel]

I downloaded a copy of this panorama maker from the web today to try it out.  I took four pictures from the porch of my house and then quickly stitched them together.  I was very impressed.  Since, I am getting used to digital I was impressed with how easy it was to create a good panorama with this free program.  If you are interested you can find it here:


http://www.tawbaware.com/maxlyons/pano12ml.htm


Bryan

[BryanHansel]

Thanks Michael.  It will be nice to have you write an article about it.  I'm having good fun stitching landscapes together.  It would be nice if you could cover how to capture the images to arrive at the best final panorama.  It seems that on some of my shots the colors shift from one photo to the next.

[CL]

I'll have a tutorial on this product in a few weeks.

Michael

And if there were ever a piece of software that begged for a tutorial, Panorama Tools would be it.

If you haven't already, check out the following sites for Pano tutorials. Perhaps Micheal can add something new to these.

http://www.panoguide.com/
http://www.caldwellphotographic.com/Mosaics.html

[Wayne Jacobsen]

I've been playing with PTAssembler also.  Its free to try, and costs $39 to register.

One hint on taking the shots is to take a couple test shots to get a good exposure, then set the camera to manual exposure.  This ensures that all the shots are exposed the same.  If you don't do that the seams can be pretty obvious.

Shots with different exposures can work OK.  When you output the final product, you can specify a layered PSD document with masks.  You can run a levels adujstment on each layer to try to get the brightness to match.  It works well sometimes.  If a seam shows in an area like the sky, you can blur the mask to hide the transition.

On shots that have objects closer than infinity, I sometimes turn off the autofocus.  The stitches can get messed up if the camera focuses on a closer object in one frame and a more distant object in the next.

--Wayne

[Wayne Jacobsen]

Here is an example of a stitch with different exposures that was "saved" by adjusting the levels of three layers:



The seams still show in the sky, which can be fixed by further blurring the layer masks.

--Wayne

[Wayne Jacobsen]

More self-criticism: there is some "double imaging" in the glacier, but its fairly easy to miss.