Pano-Stitching Question

[AndrewKulin]

Can someone point me to a set of directions/technique that can deal with wave movement evident on a multi-stitch pano?  Normally what I would do in such a situation would be longer exposure, let the waves blur out to help make stitching more seamless, but this series was taken at sunset and I elected to go for shorter exposures because light conditions change more rapidly.

What I have to work with is shown below (9x2=18 photos, pano) and a zoomed detail of the near shore wavelets showing the mis-matches in wave patterns.  These "mismatches" are evident as sharp vertical lines.

[attachment=22564:St_Andre...Panorama.jpg][attachment=22565:St_Andre..._Closeup.
jpg]

Last photo is a narrow crop - it removes most of the issue but there are still areas where it this problem is evident.  I have a couple of other panos from the same harbour/area with the same issues that I'd also like to save.  

[attachment=22566:St_Andre...Panorama.jpg]

Stitched using PTGUI, latest build 8.3.10, using Smartblend plugin.  So any tweaks with PTGUI I should consider?  Or is this something that CS5 could easily deal with using all its' new black magic?  I plan to upgrade soon (from CS3) but want to wait until after I migrate from XP-64 Pro to Windows 7.

Thanks,

[Thomas Krüger]

Try Enblend, sometimes it blends better as Smartblend: http://enblend.sourceforge.net/
You have to be careful considering the waves between getting your source images for the panorama. If you catch the wave more or less always at the same point you will have minor stitching problems. But some final retouch in Photoshop is quite always needed.

[fike]

Waves where there is a surf like you would have at the beach are always very difficult.  Rough open water can be manually blended with good results.  

I have found in most of these situations, manually blending with a soft brush on a layer mask is the best approach.  On careful examination an attentive viewer will notice something odd, but the shot will generally be fine because of the natural blurriness that is always present in photographs of moving water.

automatic blending routines rarely work well with surf, unless you are lucky enough to catch the waves in the same rough locations.

[BobFisher]

I've tried some using AutoPano.  Not perfect but pretty good and good enough that a bit of manual cleanup took care of the residual problems.  Might even be easier now with the content aware feature in CS5.

[tived]

Thats a really tough one :-)

I think its best to sort this out at the time you are shooting it, such as shoot fast handheld (I Know some are going to say, that you will miss the nodal point...but..thats another story) my own experiment is to shoot the next shot when the next wave comes in, at the point where the other was breaking. Its a lot of trail and error here. but if you are wanting higher resolution images, by which I mean shooting multi row, then this is one option that will work OK.

Alternatively is to shoot with more overlap and a wider lens.

Both PTGui and Autopano will give average result here, I often resort to PS for this. In my own case where I also shoot for HDR with 3-5 shot per frames it gets even more difficult! :-)

I would give it a shot in PS CS5 if you have it! but even PS CS4 had a good blender

good luck

Henrik

PS: I need help with correcting perspective on panos! any takers!

[button]

I've had pretty good luck with the liquify function in photoshop.  Make sure you don't select too large of an area to work with at once, or the program will barf.  If that doesn't work, you can always resort to the warp function.

John

[AndrewKulin]

Here is close to finished product - in the end I used Enblend with PTGUI, saved as layers into a psb file and from there used layer masks to blend images with (hopefully) seamless waves.  Applied some hue/saturation adjustments and did a little cloning here and there towards the lower left (removed railing, and a patch of greenish ocean "stuff" on beach which I found distracting).

One thing that I had hoped PTGUI would have done in all this was apply its exposure compensation/color correction to each of the individual layers saved on the psb file but it did not (it does so with its stitched outputs).  So I had to manually apply some brightness/contracts and some saturation corrections to some of the frames to get better color matching.

[attachment=22826:_MG_4817...nd_27x16.jpg]

[Jack Flesher]

You may want to try creating two separate blends of the same pano -- I generally use AutoPano Pro and will render one with smartblend, then the other with multiband -- for whatever reason, multiband often handles wave matches better.  Anyway, once I have the two panos, I stack them and mask/blend in the water section between the two with a soft brush.  Usually this works very well but significantly increases file size if you save both layers.

[BobFisher]

Thanks for that tip, Jack.  I use AP and hadn't tried that approach before.