UKC

Trying to create an image for a topo from a series of shots I took with a wide angle lens (sigma 10-20mm). It's a sea cliff and the only vantage point where the whole cliff was visible was quite close hence it the wide angle lens.

I have PS CS4 and have tried stitching using the various settings, none are great, some are totally off but with others it's more subtle - rock bulging in place it shouldn't, cracks not connecting or bending when they shouldn't. The best setting seems to be 'reposition'.

I have tired using the lens correction on each image before stitching but it doesn't seem to be that effective.

Anyone any ideas?

In reply to Dave Flanagan:
How Many shots? I think it might be too wide - how much did you over lap each shots? 1 /3; is good ½ is better!

In reply to Stevie989:

Some are just 2, some 3, some 4. Obviously the more shots the greater the overlap but that didn't seem to help much, in fact the ones with four shots came out worse.

In reply to Dave Flanagan:

Try Hugin Panorama Stitcher, there's nothing better than this app. You can post-process the photo in Photoshop after you stitched it.

In reply to PPP:

Thanks will try that.

photoshop stitches reasonably well, but doesn't give many options for tweaking and controlling the output when things get tricky.

I use ptGUI but I've heard Hugin is good too. Cylindrical projections often work best for wide panos, avoid rectilinear.

Stitching Ultra wide angle images is often problematic because of the lens distortion - lens correction doesn't help as the distortion is simply caused by using a wide rectilinear lens, which causes that stretched corner look. Using a larger number of photos taken at a less extreme focal length can help stitching.

In reply to Dave Flanagan:

I've used "panorama factory" with my 17-40 lens, manually entering the match points, works well.

In reply to Dave Flanagan:

+1 for ptGui. In a different league compared to Photoshop's built in stitch.

In reply to Dave Flanagan:

Be careful with 'reposition' for crag shots as it can erase some of the image (it looks great on your screen but when you compare it to the crag in question there can be features missing.

The safest way to do it is to stitch spherical and then warp it back to the correct shape (Free transform - warp).

However as everyone has said stitching multiple wide angle lens shots is difficult no matter what program you use. The general rule is try and get it into as fewer shots as possible.

I bought the Nikon 14-24 for a full frame purely on the back of the problem you just described.

In reply to Dave Flanagan:

Try ICE from Microsoft Research. It's written by Richard Szeliski's group, more recently responsible for Photosynth and the 'hyperlapse' video interpolation research. Use CS4's 'Context Aware-Fill' to fill in the gaps.

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

In reply to Dan Arkle:

I've had good results with Hugin, it's not the most user friendly tool but it does the job.

In reply to Dave Flanagan:

The best panorama software I've used actually came with my Nikon P330:

http://arcsoft-panorama-maker.software.informer.com/

I've never used it with my own Sigma 10-20mm, but everything else has resulted in a decent job, so you could maybe try using a different lens and doing a 'patch-type' panorama.


Some samples of my own attempts below:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/70132285@N07/14566383882/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/70132285@N07/14266944745/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/70132285@N07/13783609183/