Problem Stitching panoramas

alexlyons

I shot a 6 shot pano down in dingle, manual everything except wb and metering, although not sure if I can do manual metering? and the WB was on sunshine.

When I try to line stuff up, I can get say a wall to line up, but then a mountain is out... How do you people do it and make them look so good?

tricky D

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_stitching

At the bottom it has software links and references to tools in PhotoShop.

alexlyons

cheers, should have said I was using photoshop. I didn't know about the auto-blend option, very handy However it seems my images were taken wrong in the first place. Nothing was changed while shooting, the exif data confirms this also. All I did was move the tripod head, and its not a ball and socket. it's actually really weird. I'll try get an example up

Slidinginfinity

I like using this do to the hard work for me. Then tweak the output as I see fit in either PS or Lightroom.

alexlyons

This is what auto-blend gave me. Note the way its all off...

charybdis

There's only so much compensation for parallax error possible in post-processing.

I'm guessing you shot this handheld and moved the camera around a fair bit while doing so?

Ideally, you'd pivot the camera around the nodal point of the lens to minimise the kind of parallax error seen here.

tricky D

You could give the Photomerge a try. It worked much better with the few experiments I tried.

File>Automate>Photomerge

Heebie

Looking at your photo.. it looks like the angle of the camera in the Z axis (up and down) in relation to the shoreline changed. (It would change a tiny bit from rotating the camera.. but the focus changing, and the zoom level changing would be more drastic than just the rotation.)

The stitch that you're using looks like it starts from the left & goes to the right. Is it possible to begin with the central photo of the group, and lay the other photos under it. (as layers in photoshop I would assume.) you'll probably want to fiddle about with the blend as the lighting definitely changed between shots. (here in Ireland.. it usually will.)

You could try "stretching" each layer in relation to the next as well. Up until nearly 1/2 way across the image, the bottom seems stable, and the shoreline doesn't change a lot.. but then there's that really drastic one. The clouds appear to line up, but even the far shortline (Iveragh Peninsula? maybe? Looks like you were looking South?) Perhaps "stretching" that layer a tiny bit and then changing the alignment would help?

Do you have enough overlap in the photos to try putting it together with fewer pieces? Or maybe some way to force it to divide in different spots? (Maybe try & get the entire lane heading down to the shore from a single shot?

Another thing to think about: Perhaps the software was keying it's alignment on something that works in the first few frames, but somehow gets messed up from there on? The alignment at the bottom does appear to "jitter" and I'd expect that to be a simple function from one frame to the next. Try a different software to see if you get a different result? (I believe at least two people have provided links to other software to try.)

Have fun.. get it right & it will be a nice shot!

Morrisseeee

manual everything except wb and metering

Thats the crucial point, you deffo need the wb (white balance) to be set to manual, ie. a specific value for each shot, otherwise if its on Auto it will change as you pan to a slightly different view. If the pics were taken in RAW format you can set them all to a specific value, eg. 5600 kelvin and then re-do the stitch. If the zoom was the same for each shot and you overlapped a little then it should work out ok, I know PS does an excellent job.

magicbastarder

tray autostitch - it's not perfect, but i usually can't fault it.

ThOnda

Microsoft ICE is free and does quite good job. However I prepare the files before processing them in the ICE (remove vignetting, dust spot removal...).

alexlyons

charybdis wrote: »

I'm guessing you shot this handheld and moved the camera around a fair bit while doing so?

You may have missed my point in my second post about it being on tripod

Heebie wrote: »

Looking at your photo.. it looks like the angle of the camera in the Z axis (up and down) in relation to the shoreline changed. (It would change a tiny bit from rotating the camera.. but the focus changing, and the zoom level changing would be more drastic than just the rotation.)

The focus and zoom were all identical for the entire shot

Heebie wrote: »

The stitch that you're using looks like it starts from the left & goes to the right. Is it possible to begin with the central photo of the group, and lay the other photos under it. (as layers in photoshop I would assume.) you'll probably want to fiddle about with the blend as the lighting definitely changed between shots. (here in Ireland.. it usually will.)

The lighting does change, even though they all shot within 45 seconds. Not sure how i'd go about starting with the centre image.. If i did that, then say the right one would be the layer under it, then the left of centre would be under the right of centre etc?? doesn't seem like it'd make a whole load of difference...?

Heebie wrote: »

You could try "stretching" each layer in relation to the next as well. Up until nearly 1/2 way across the image, the bottom seems stable, and the shoreline doesn't change a lot.. but then there's that really drastic one. The clouds appear to line up, but even the far shortline (Iveragh Peninsula? maybe? Looks like you were looking South?) Perhaps "stretching" that layer a tiny bit and then changing the alignment would help?

I did try warping on of the images when I was trying it manually, did look ok but different parts of the same image required minorly different warps.. Was taken of slea head near dingle.

Heebie wrote: »

Do you have enough overlap in the photos to try putting it together with fewer pieces? Or maybe some way to force it to divide in different spots? (Maybe try & get the entire lane heading down to the shore from a single shot?

No. I actually have more, and removed them, the lane is in one of the images completely, and some of it overlaps in another, so that should be fine...

Heebie wrote: »

Another thing to think about: Perhaps the software was keying it's alignment on something that works in the first few frames, but somehow gets messed up from there on? The alignment at the bottom does appear to "jitter" and I'd expect that to be a simple function from one frame to the next. Try a different software to see if you get a different result? (I believe at least two people have provided links to other software to try.)

Have fun.. get it right & it will be a nice shot!

I shall do this tomorrow hopefully. I certainly hope I can get it right and make it a good shot! a guy down in a restaurant that looks out on the view wants to sell it from the restaurant :eek: not sure it's that good Thanks for the help.

ThOnda wrote: »

Microsoft ICE is free and does quite good job. However I prepare the files before processing them in the ICE (remove vignetting, dust spot removal...).

I'm on a mac but thanks

joeKel73

This is easy...

1. Upgrade to a PC.
2. Run either AutoStitch or Microsoft ICE.

smelltheglove

What lens were you using? Could it possibly be down to barrel or pincushion distortion? Looks to me like your clouds are lined up ok but the bottom of the images are not so I would firstly expect it to be distortion.

Did you merge the original files or did you edit first? Looking at this the images in the right seem like they are missing some at the bottom, is this right?

stcstc

download a trial of PTGUI and stitch it with that

it will eave watermarks cos its a trial, but you will be suprised at the results from it

BUT

you do need to be careful shooting panos for stitching


parallax errors can be cause by not rotating around the nodal point of the lense

although for landscape type shots parallax errors wont generally be a problem

Haven't done much in the way of panorama, but when I have, autostitch was really good I thought.

If you do decide to use it though, make sure you go into the options and change the scale of the image to 100%. It's at 10% or something by default, so your overall image is thumbnail sized at the end.

I had the trial version, but it did a grand job and never left watermarks or anything. Not sure how it was a 'trial' to be honest. It didn't expire.






Autostitch did the above. I think it was 16 photos or something. I was just hoping for the best with it. One of my very first attempts.

alexlyons

foto joe wrote: »

This is easy...

1. Upgrade Downgrade to a PC.
2. Run either AutoStitch or Microsoft ICE.

Fixed that for ya

smelltheglove wrote: »

What lens were you using? Could it possibly be down to barrel or pincushion distortion? Looks to me like your clouds are lined up ok but the bottom of the images are not so I would firstly expect it to be distortion.

Did you merge the original files or did you edit first? Looking at this the images in the right seem like they are missing some at the bottom, is this right?

Was using Nikon 18-105 VR. Wouldn't have thought there would be that much distortion? Didn't edit them, although I do see what you mean, not to sure why, but I think the reason for that loss is due to it being so far out it moved the images up..

stcstc wrote: »

parallax errors can be cause by not rotating around the nodal point of the lens

And how might I do that?

stcstc

you need a specialist head

i use a manfrotto one

http://www.amazon.com/Manfrotto-303SPH-Spherical-Panoramic-Black/dp/B00017LRDQ

cnocbui

I think 'need' is a bit strong. I have had good results from shooting handheld and stitching manually in PS on a Mac:



Shot on slide film, low light, hand-held.

stcstc

my response was to the question how to rotate around the nodal point of the lens,

so my answer is still, to do this you need a specialist head


BUT like i said for landscape type shots, parallax errors dont really come into it. but if you doing say street scenes for example or interiors you will need a pano head, ideally

freddyhard

@ alexlyons: i use autopano pro (works on a mac, so no need to down grade) and it did this in about 10 minutes from over 30 images. the original was over 24000x7000 pixels.



this was a spherical projection (for background images in dcc applications) but it can be done on a plane as well. there is a demo version to download, but if that is limited in some fashion i will give it a go on my PC.

(i will delete this image shortly, because it is destroying the forum layout!)