Panoramas |
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The Virtual Reality panorama below is a low res version of a file comprising 12 shots in two layers, stitched togther to give a field of view of approximately 250 deg by 90 deg. Hold
left mouse button down to pan and tilt this image or to stop it moving. |
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It was shot near Burton Bradstock on the Jurassic coast of Dorset. The ancient limestone pavement is normally beneath the sea and is only visible for a short time at low tide. I didn't use a tripod (but would advise doing so for easier stitching together afterwards!!). There are 7 portrait format shots
of the foreground and 5 landscape format shots of the sky, stitched
together
in two
layers. Each individual frame was separately transformed into cylindrical
perspective prior to manually stitching in Photoshop. However,
my usual method of stitching is using PTAssembler, see below. |
About panorama stitching Most of the stitched panorama photographs I have processed have been made by simply joining together between 2 and 12 exposures made on digital cameras. Various software has been used. Canon and Pentax supply joining software with their cameras and PhotoShop CS/CS2 has a panorama stitcher built in. All of these will do an adequate job, though the joins can often be seen at high magnification. Software For a really spectacular stitching job "Panorama Tools" by Helmut Dersch is excellent software. http://webuser.fh-furtwangen.de/~dersch/ will take you to his original download pages, though using them on their own is a difficult operation. To get over these difficulties, various people have produced a graphical user user interface (GUI) to bolt on to Panorama Tools. There are two that I have used with success. The first is PT Assembler which is downloadable as a trial and a small purchase fee provides a key to the software. The second is an open source GUI called Hugin which is being developed and is in a beta version. It promised to be even better than PT Assembler (IMO) in that the user interface is easier to use. It has one or two problems at present, but they are working on improvements all the time. You can download Hugin from http://hugin.sourceforge.net/ and see tutorials here With both PT Assembler and Hugin, you can have as much or as little control over the final stitch as you want and have the panorama output in a variety of ways. I choose to output as layered PhotoShop with masks (most other software just gives you a flat file). Leaving the pano in layers means that I can make fine adjustments to the tones/colours of the sections, to make a totally seamless stitch. PhotoShop CS3 - the panorama stitching tool was much improved in CS3 and very often the resultant stsich is as good as those made by Hugin and PT Assembler. However, there is much less control available to cope with more difficult stitches and it's a case of "suck it and see". Having said that, I've madde some very well stitched panos with this software. More information on shooting and stitching panoramas and panoramas by my husband John can be found at www.PanoramaShots.co.uk
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