Panoramas and software

[Peter McLennan]

Peter is not wrong in his post but it does depend on the composition.

Indeed, Tony.  If there are foreground elements close to the lens, then all bets are off.

[MatthewCromer]

Why not just use an ultrawide on a camera in liveview mode to "see" the comps?  You could stick a panoramic "window" on the LCD while you play around with it?  Then go put on your Zeiss 100 and tripod and start shooting!

[bjanes]

Photomerge in Photoshop CS 5 is pretty good, previous versionso f Photomerge are awful.
I use PTGui Pro 9.1.3.

The real technical tricks with making good quality panoramas are:
- Make sure your camera is in manual everything: ISO, focus, & white balance and turn off anything like Nikon's ADL settings.
- Focus carefully - use live view if your camera has it.
- If you have significant near /far spatial relationships in your composition, use a nodal point rail so you can rotate the camera+ lens around the lens' entrance pupil. This will cure almost all of your parallax problems
- Overlap adjacent frames more than most software and hardware companies and tutorial writers recommend to.
- If shooting landscapes,  work in Pro Photo RGB (and yes that means 16 bit per channel) as there are a lot of colors in nature that are outside the gamut of even the moderately large working space Adobe RGB(1998)
- use Lancroz 256.


But the overriding trick is figuring out where to stand to make the most dynamic composition

Ellis,

Everything sounds like good advice. What do you do when part of the pano includes shadow areas that you want to boost in the final stitch? Do you recommend adjusting exposure on the camera (using shutter speed, I would think) or in post processing. I do have the basic RRS pano setup, but would like to occasionally do 2 row panos without buying the complete RSS pano setup. I have thought of getting a simple tilt head (such as the Manfretto monopod head). Most of my work involves rather distant scenes, so parallax might not be a problem. Do you think that would work?

Thanks,

Bill

PS what is Lancroz 256? A simple google search is not helpful.

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

Everything sounds like good advice. What do you do when part of the pano includes shadow areas that you want to boost in the final stitch? Do you recommend adjusting exposure on the camera (using shutter speed, I would think) or in post processing.

Hi Bill,

I use exposure bracketing and first create tonemapped tiles from the bracketed shots, which I then stitch. Depending on the situation, you may even get away with variable exposure time single exposures, but only if you use liberal amounts of overlap (say 50% overlap between adjacent tiles). It does require a competent blending engine to equalize the resulting exposure gradient.

I do have the basic RRS pano setup, but would like to occasionally do 2 row panos without buying the complete RSS pano setup. I have thought of getting a simple tilt head (such as the Manfretto monopod head). Most of my work involves rather distant scenes, so parallax might not be a problem. Do you think that would work?

When you dedicate 1 row to the area that involves foreground detail, then you'll obviously get a pefect fit there (assuming rotation around the no-parallax axis). The other layer row will probably blend reasonably well especially if, again, a liberal amount of overlap is used.

PS what is Lancroz 256? A simple google search is not helpful.

A Lanczos 256 (16x16) pixel area kernel is indicated, also know as an 8-lobe support Lanczos filtered Sinc filter (+/- 8 lobes * +/- 8 lobes in orthogonal directions). While it allows accurate signal reconstruction/resampling when small sub-pixel displacements are required, it also is prone to creating ringing artifacts with a higher amplitude closer to edges.

Cheers,
Bart