UKC

Looking to improve my panoramic work, recommend me a good set up....what softwear? who is using a pano head? tips/advice in general much appreciated.
Shaun

In reply to shaun walby:
would help if you could give some examples of what you are doing now.
what you think is going wrong?

as for softwear i tend to wear a warm hat and gloves in addition to normal outdoor clothes

opps sorry, i mean i use the photomerge function in photoshop

In reply to shaun walby:

360 panorama on iPhone

http://360.io/W68mQD/f

In reply to shaun walby:

Problems with Parallex iam using a geared head , its great but the rotation falls away from the nodal point significantly in portrait, stitching software struggles...well it does in CS4.

Iam looking at Autopan pro or PTgui and i might be better with a ball head, but somehow doubt i need a panoramic head

In reply to shaun walby:

Sony NEX - I just press the button and wave my arm in front of me

In reply to hokkyokusei:

It would help to see some examples

IMHO cs3 and later are good at stitching. Look at ice and Hugin which are free

Do you have seem really close forground objects

Are you locking focus, exposre and white balance for the whole pano?

My setup is still ptGUI - export as layers and touch up any problems in PS using layer masks or clone tool. I hear Hugin is good.

I've got a homemade panoramic head (two aluminium L's and some screws), but most of my images worth stitching are where I haven't been able to take a tripod, so are handheld and involve a bit of 'joining the dots'.

Learning to correct any defects using masks, cloning and reshaping (transforming) sections in PS or GIMP is a great skill to have.

In reply to shaun walby:

Hand held shots (in portrait mode) and then stitch with hugin.

Newer hugin builds are much faster as they feature a new blending tool.

Heres one I did earlier give or take a few years
http://www.prog99.com/Stuff/aonach_mor_panorama.jpg

In reply to Mike_Watson_99:
- nice one, well done for adding the captions too. a useful aid for those (like me) who don't know the Highlands well.

In reply to Mike_Watson_99:

Nice. Is there a particular reason you shoot in portrait?

In reply to hokkyokusei:

I agree, Sony panos are soo easy. I prefer though my camera in Portait mode.

http://brad-jackson.info/panoramas-with-the-sony-a77/

In reply to Damo:
Gives more margin for error when lining up the shots.

Dan, wouldn't guarantee that the far away hills are correct!

In reply to Damo:

It gieves a better aspect ratio and avoids having to shoot more rows.

I shoot hand-held with MF and in manual then then sort the image out in CS5. I agree that a few slightly-ninja photoshop skills help a lot!

Most of these are stitched http://www.andyhphotos.com/Galleries/Landscapes/index.html

The best big stiched exmaple is probably this http://www.andyhphotos.com/Galleries/Landscapes/content/pano_2_large.html

In reply to shaun walby:

I use Autopano Pro - it's easy to use and does a good job (but it is reasonably pricy)

Free trial available on the website: http://www.kolor.com/panorama-software-autopano-pro.html

In reply to shaun walby:

Handheld in portrait orientation with lots of margin at top and bottom. 1/4 to 1/3 overlapping photos. Shooting at manual exposure and predefined white balance. Can also do it with manual focus but no need to most of the times I think. I have also seen cool photos where the focus is different in the different photos, for instance mountains in the background are in focus except for one shot where the foreground subject are in focus.

Photomerge function in photoshop - perfect and no problems almost every time (as long as it’s not something complicated with moving foreground objects.)

In reply to Ulrik Hasemann:

I have a few panos here: http://hasemannphotos.com/lonely-days-in-argentiere/

In reply to shaun walby:

I've got a full multi row RSS set up, etc, etc, etc (blah, blah).

But, rarely use it nowadays - mostly go hand held, manual exposure, shoot RAW (deal with WB in LR4), manual focus, loads of overlap, funky used of Grad NDs if needed.

Develop, match WB, & 'match exposure' in LR4, export as either 16 bit Tiff or jpg (depending on how bothered I am), and then Stitch in AutoPanoPro.

Import back into LR4 for final developing.

In reply to hindu: The best big stiched exmaple is probably this http://www.andyhphotos.com/Galleries/Landscapes/content/pano_2_large.html

Impressive, you can see the curvature of the Earth on that one

In reply to shaun walby:

Seriously though, one of my biggest complaints about panos is that a lot of folks don't pay enough attention to getting the horizon straight.
This is more of a problem when shooting portrait as it's v difficult to keep the camera level.

My method to avoid this is to not try and stitch 5 shots all at once. Each frame has to be opened, compared to it's neighbours, rotated as required, then stitched in pairs to build up the pano from from those pairs.

It's as big a ball-ache as it sounds, but is the way to get a true representation.

In reply to sheep:


Very easy to achieve in AutoPanoPro with the 'Set Verticals' tool.

In reply to sheep:

And isn't 'true representation' an oxymoron?

In reply to ChrisJD:

I've not used AutoPanoPro. The method i described is how i do it in CS4, so it's only my own time that i'm wasting. Each to their own and all that.


And isn't 'true representation' an oxymoron?

Yeah, i guess it is.

The search for truth is a long, hard road and mistakes will be made along the way

In reply to shaun walby:

Thanks some good thoughts/ideas in there...

Shaun

In reply to sheep:

Kind of made me curious as to how high you can be before you can see appreciable curvature of the earth.

58,000' perhaps?

http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/tech_ops/read.main/93734/

In reply to radson:

http://www.adventurearchive.com/images/everestposter.jpg

there's this from Leo Dickinson.

Wether or not that's, ahem, a 'true representation' i don't know.

In reply to sheep:

It isn't. Its a fisheye shot - ie the lens has introduced the distortion.

In reply to shaun walby: I shoot with automatic exposure, the camera deals with this fine and the pano software smooths the gaps in most cases. Landscape format, and portait in the most extreme cases (Slovakia comes to mind when the mountains only just fitted into the viewfinder portrait!)

I stitch with Autopano Pro - a pretty solid program.

http://kevinwoods.co.uk/photography/panosSH.htm Lots of work still to do on my page there, but time consuming doesn't cover it!

In reply to kwoods:

Some wonderful panoramas there - makes me want to get out into the hills again - which I would do if I wasn't on crutches

Autopano is great - by far the easiest stitching software I've found!

OM

In reply to Kevin Woods:

Excellent work Kevin perfect scene choice/comp for the panos and the technical aspects all look very good

Shaun

In reply to shaun walby:

Get Microsoft ICE for stitching together images. Ive used quite a few pieces of software for this, inc. photoshop, but this thing is a seriously clever piece of software and will stitch things together that wouldnt work in photoshop! Its free, I think cos its kinda in beta stage.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ice/