This is not exactly new, but nonetheless I am intersted in who regularly does this for the same reasons I give below.

I supose I am a nominally large format film photographer who no longer seems to shoot film. Instead I have taken to pretending that 22mp digital capture is good enough.

Well, it isn't (at least not always), and I have surmised that 39mp or somewhere in between is not quite there either. My entirely subjective view based on my observations are that you need around 75mp to match 4x5 LF film when drum scanned. YMMV.

So, recently I have been experimenting more seriously with using stitching software, not for panoramic image creation, but simply as an easy means of achieving the resolutions nominally required to match large format. Using a Manfrotto pano head, and my Mamiya ZD and either the 80mm or 55mm lenses, this has worked pretty well provided I don't overdo it.

A successful workflow has involved just 6 images in two rows of 3 each, up to a maximum for flat projection of 4 images in three rows. But the six shot option even allowing for overlap blending wastage, gets up to 4x5 territory without the expense and uncertaintly of LF film and with superior dynamic range potential.

I have been using PTGUi Pro, which also works with the free Enfuse plug-in to enable HDR blending and which is an excellent alternative to tone mapping for HDR stitching, and the Smartblend plug-in for blending (which I so far prefer to Enblend). Resulting stiches look pretty natural with no visible joins. The only downside is the processing time even on a fast PC.

I'm pretty enthusiastic about the portential for all kinds of landscape and architectural work, in effect a software resolution upgrade when needed.

Quentin

I would love to hear more regarding your experience. What pano head are you using?
do you experience any misalignments from distortion, and how stable is the pano head? is it exact enough not to cause any misalignments when you shift it?

I just got the Manfrotto 303plus head to sit atop my 055 Pro B legs, and I have found that getting the no-parallax point is really important but also quite tedious to do. Unless I am getting it all wrong, I have found that you can still get into situations where the images don't line up on auto.

I'm still trying to figure out how to deal with this.

Hi,

Im using a Manfrotto pano head lent to me by someone else! Sorry not to be more specific; I'll post the details later on when I have access to the model number. Using a proper pano head does make life easier. Click stops mean image spacing is accurate.

So far, almost zero misalignments and minimal distortion . I shoot in portrait format. Given I am capturing a "wide angle" shot with a standard lens, such distortions as there are are less apparent than with a genuine wide angle, and with no edge definition fall-off. It is however important not to push things too far, which is why I don't go crazy with too many images. Using a 22mp medium format camera means I am starting with quite high resolution in the first place, so it is not necessary to shoot dozens of images to achieve a large format effect.

I also take some care to align the lens over the nodal point. That helps prevent errors. The software I am using is excellent and will tell me if there are potential problems before stitching.

Quentin

I use Really Right Stuff "Ultimate-Pro Omni-Pivot Package" with RRS ballhead BH-55 & Gitzo tripod. This really gets the foundation right before the software & the camera takes over.

What software are you using to stitch? I can't praise the PTGui Pro / smartblend combination too highly and it is cost effective.

Quentin

I'm very pleased with PTGui, too. It's the only software that can stitch my images taken with the Schneider 24 mm without problems.

I have used Autopano Pro for sticthing of 20+ TIFF files from Mamiya ZD with a great success. I think Autopano Pro is a best software for the task, also considering the workflow. Autopano team is REALLY listening to the user's requests and is improving software on a constant basis.

I use Kaidan spherical pano head IV and would not recommend it. There is lack of support on Kaidan's side and the rotator is a bit shaky, it can never be set to rotate without woubling the horison line.

I have so far tried the PhotoMerge in Photoshop CS, AutoPano Pro, and I have been told that CS3's PhotoMerge is a lot better, so I will try that out if I can. I'll check out if PTGui has a trial version, definitely worth a try. I find that the experience with AutoPano Pro can be mixed - i've had situations where I've just machine gunned handheld (in a manner of speech) a few shots and it stitched them no problems, and other cases where I used the pano head with just 2 shots and had an alignment problem. I'm definitely doing something wrong here, I guess so perhaps it's "back to school" until I get it right.

I guess this is pretty important to me since the widest lens I have is the 50mm, AND I have the smaller 37x37 square sensor. The Bronica archives speak of some sort of mythical 35mm which unfortunately, I have never seen on the used market.

Hi Quentin. I sometimes stich 3 to 4 of my P45+ shots together in Photoshop CS3. I'm continually amazed at how good CS3 stiching is. Sometimes I do it for a pano, but I also do it to crank up the resolution on certain shots that are crying out for a lot of fine detail. I use a regular ball head and rely on CS3 to align the images. So far that's worked fine, unless you have something prominent in the foreground.

Mort.

Since CS3 I have not used PTGui anymore. I use RRS basic panohead (single row), in portrait mode. I made panos with the 80mm but now own the zoom as well as the 100 which should work significantly better.

The only downside to the RRS I find is that the slider starts at 18cm's at the camera mount???

IMO it would have made a lot more sense if the center at the camera mount would have started at 0 so you can set the distance for the nodal point precise. Now I need to subtract what I see from 18cm before I get the set distance.

Is anyone experiencing the same thing with the RRS or is my slider a fluke and do all other sliders start with 0 at the camera mount?

Fortunately someone at Hasselblad was so kind to state the nodal points distances of every HC lens in the spec's.

Hi Mort,

I have not tried CS3's pano stitching as yet, but perhaps I should. Certainly PTGui seems pretty flawless at multi-row panos (with the Smarblend plug-in used for blending) and the Enfuse HDR plugiin allows simultanous HDR bending all in one step. Pretty cool.

A dedicated Pano head does help too.

Quentin

I just tried a very quick 2 shot panorama with PTgui using the default settings and it would seem to have succeeded where AutoPano and PhotoShop CS failed on the same 2 shots. I shall try more panoramas in the days to come and perhaps compare how the different tools perform, but looking at this so far, it looks like PTgui is the champ.

CS2 stitching was not very good but CS3 is excellent. CS3 stitching can work from RAW and generates a 16bit image with layers, blending and masks -- automatically.

This is certainly not true, neither is that a particular lens would pose particular problems.

The "father of stitchers" is Panorama Tools, which is free but it does not have an interactive user interface. There are at least three products based on Panorama Tools:

1. PTGUi,

2. Panorama Tools Assembler much cheaper than PTGUi),

3. Hugin (free).

CS2 sucks, but CS3 is just about perfect. I have yet to find a combination that doesn't work in CS3. I've done multi-row stiches of 6 images with 39 MP images from a P45+ back and it works like a charm.

O.k., perhaps I've not testet all existing stitching software, only sofware for Mac. Before I had Stitcher, which is much more expensive, and I tested some other Mac-Software that was advised in a german forum. Some people in this forum tried to stitch my Schneider-Digitar-24mm Images with little success. The only Mac-Software which done it with ease then was PTGui.

I must confess that I don`t know Panorama Tools and Hugin, sorry.

FWIW I use stitching weekly for my clients and have never found the necessity of going beyond CS3.


But my real question is........what is the "uncertainty of LF film"? I made my living for almost 30 years with 4x5 and never found it "uncertain".

No need to be sorry, but you are working with Panorama Tools.

Although the PTGui team has re-written all or part of Panorama Tools, that is still Panorama Tools (I think you can now choose between the original PT and PTGUi's version).

Panorama Tools Assembler too is working with Panorama Tools. The capabilitiess of PTGUi and PTAssembler are virtually identical, with different user interfaces. The real stitching capability still comes from the original PT. Its originator layed the foundation for a precise geometrical approach, which has become the "standard".

Autopano, Photoshop, etc. are only for unassuming projects.

Lots - fogged film, development errors, exposure mistakes, you name it. I have not suffered from these problems much, if at all, but there is always the fear of disaster. Maybe I'm just the nervous type...

Then there is the cost. Expensive.


Quentin

I have been stitching a lot for years now, using both PTgui and Autopano Pro (1.4 being probably the best package out there at the moment).

I have found the auto stitching abilities of Autopano Pro with low contrast images containing areas with little marked features to be vastly superior to PTgui's. On the other hand I prefer PTgui's interface for control points etc...

You might be interesting in knowing that as of PTgui Pro 7.8 they have implemented their own version of the infuse algo (HDR based on pixel level brightness evaluation in 16 bit space). This works pretty well per my first tests.

One recent sample made up of 36 Nikon D3 images (resulting image is 200 megap pixel). This was shot a few weeks ago in the Himalayas, the mountan pictures is Pumori at 7150 m. This was shot with a RRS pano head.



Thanks to its speed of operation and wonderfully stable shutter, I have found the D3 to be much easier to use for stitching purpose than the Mamiya ZD I also use.

- Very high quality moderate ISO (400 or even 800 ISO) is a huge plus in various shooting conditions where the ZD's low ISO is a real pain since it induces longer exposures,
- The ability to check images sharpness on screen at pixel level in a fraction of a second is a blessing when using longer lenses in windy situations,
- Deep RAW buffer also help with panos containing more than 10 images.

Cheers,
Bernard

This is very surprising. Was the lens correctly positioned on top of its nodal point when you shot with a tripod?

Regards,
Bernard

I'm surprised so many are happy with CS3. You don't appear to have any perspective and distortion control. I've never hard it work for me.

PTGui, on the other hand, works great. (And I'm sure the other PT based tools would do the same job).

I've only had the pano head about a week so far, and looking back at the test shots I used, the ones that were shot handheld and succeeded were the distant landscape type shots with no nearby objects. I also tried some other handheld panos, not so much (I hope) to be an idiot but to understand the limits and limitations:

1. Vintage Porsche in the street: handheld - heavy misalignment of foreground and background elements - ok, now I know, don't go there unless you have a pano head.

2. Living room 2 shot pano with the pano head - I simply couldn't get AutoPano Pro or Photoshop CS to get them to line up exactly. There were close and distant objects, so I knew that it's a challenging one, but the PTgui 7.8 trial software stitched that up wonderfully.

My key learning from the other postings and my experience is to go back and double check that the camera is properly positioned over the nodal point and be more rigorous in my technique. It's obviously not the head or the software but me!

Same thing here... not very impressed with CS3 compared to what the leading products do.

I am also at a loss as to why Adobe is wasting time working on such specialized features but is telling us that CS4 for Mac will still not be 64 bits. John, come on.

Cheers,
Bernard

My experience also is that Autopano Pro does a better job than CS3. It's the only stitching program I've come across that seems to stitch almost anything automatically, including HDR in the same process.

It's necessary, however, to make adjustments in 'setup' first. I found the default settings to be a bit substandard.

Yes, Bernard, Once you are comfortble with a stitching workflow, then for many purposes, pxel quality and kit useability becomes more important that simple pixel count, because you get the resolution you need through stitching. So I can well understand your liking for the D3 for panos.

In what circumstances do you still use the ZD for panos? Carrying the ZD and lenses plus D3 and lenses would add up to a lot of weight.

I have used the HDR function with PTGui, works a treat.

Nice shot of the mountain too.

cheers

Quentin

PS It has taken me a while to get over the feeling that a stitched image is not "cheating" in some way, as if its not a real photo. Of course, that idea is nonesense, but I can't completely shake it off for some reason.

Good question. Actually I haven't used the ZD for stitching a single time since I got the D3 back in November last year. This was mostly related to the poor cold weather battery performance of the ZD.

Now that temperatures have mostly risen to a more acceptable level, I'll have to think of some criteria to decide what I use when. I guess that I'll probably keep using the D3 for more adventurous outings and use the ZD for more urban endeavours. Although the D3 has progressed a lot compared to the D2x in terms of DR, the ZD is still ahead.



I can relate with that. I guess that with stitching you are sort of left alone with your shooting ethics in trying to create an image that is faithful to the scene you were looking at. My view is that there is some hidden process going on whatever the shooting method. The main difference with stitching is that you get to look at some of the magic and play a more active role in litteraly putting the pieces back together. Fundamentally though the same thing is going on. Technology helps freezing in time a scene and materializing it into an image that can be seen on various media.

The only philosophical difference is in the time span over which the image is captured, but stitching is not alone in this. All the scanning devices end up compressing into a seeingly instantaneous event things that did in fact happen over the course of a few seconds or minutes. Traditional photography long exposures also do this, but they are more upfront in revealing to the viewer that the static photograph is the integral in time of some non instantaneous happenings.

The underlying question though is still always the same. Does photography really need to claim that it is a litteral representation of reality? I think not. Once you agree that reality cannot be captured in a photograph, then the importance of a stitch being truely faithful to reality diminishes somewhat I feel.

I have been thinking of writting a piece on these aspects for LL for some time, but need to do a bit more research on the topic.

Regards,
Bernard

Not to sidetrack the OP but I've been reading this post and you bring up an interesting (and often talked about) discussion.
I think part of the "issue" with photography is related and comes through how we talk about it. As an artist who uses cameras to create images, I don't seem to have this baggage. Where many of the photographers I know, think of this "issue". Photographers use words like "take" and "capture" as though the actual thing (see truth) will be documented. Artists use words like "create", "put together", etc. I like to think "I create nice images" versus "I take nice pictures". But I digress, could be an interesting thread if done right and not get into the is it real/is it art, etc. debate.

- Doug

Could any of you stitchers help me on this one?
with the first two images no problem at all, minus a small adjustment.
But when I try to stitch the blue photos in CS3 I seem to have a big problem
I shot this on a normal tripod like the successful ones.
Never mind the dust, virtually impossible to change lenses in beijing and not end up
with a wollop of dust on your sensor.
much appreciated
m*

I haven't tried your images, but just wanted to commiserate...
This type of image almost always fails for me with Autopano and PS, resulting in lots of hand retouching jogged lines at seams. It's completely worthless to try stitching multiple rows on subjects like this, since you have to fix seams in two directions.

I have no trouble with landscape subjects. With (contemporary) architectural subjects, the smooth surfaces, continuous lines and repeating similar patterns seem to really throw the auto-stitching type programs for a loop. PT-based stitchers with manually-placed control points are the only way I've been able to deal with this type of image. Of course this is pretty time consuming for commercial work.

All IME, but I'm using RRS pivots with carefully measured pivot points.

Tried a bit with PTgui with carefully hand positioned control points... doesn't like it either. There is a tremendous parallax problem with your images.

I don't know what camera you shot this with, nor how well you had positioned the lens relative to its nodal point, but this is probably beyond hope.

Cheers,
Bernard

FWIW, I only shoot contemporary architecture for a living and do a couple of stitches in each shoot (averaging 6 stitches a week). I only use CS3 and have no problems with it at all.

Hi Kirk, nice work on your site.

I only see a few images in your new arch. work that I'd be leery of stitching. Mostly glass/steel with strong perspective: Albuquerque Museum exterior, "Breathing Space 8", perhaps Fire Station 21 (depending on where the frames overlap), and Sandia MINI, although the angle of view doesn't seem too wide.

Have you compared the perspective between CS3 stitched shots and a single frame from a shift lens (matched for angle of view)? It's been a while since I checked this, there was some reason I was turned off of PS stitching that I can't recall now...

Cheers

Gidday,

Your right this was a tricky one.

Simon

Using AutoPano Pro 1.4.1 it seems very straightforward... I used Highest detection quality and it stitched perfectly. In general, AutoPano requires much less overlap than these images have.

Thanks guys, seems like the proof is in the pudding and I will have to give Autopano
a try. A while back I saw a demonstration of a stitching program in which they stitched a row of houses that could then be individually straightened with set up guide points.
Can you do that in Auto pano?.
Seems that Simon's shows more or less the same result I had in CS3 and Michael' really looks like it should,
thanks again
m*

Marc, to answer your question, yes, Autopano allows to quite easily straighten buildings in the panorama.

P.S.
For that sample render I used Smartblend blender which eliminated any ghosting in the final result, color correction to smooth the transitions (though they were already pretty smooth), and global rotation to straighten the horizon + crop.

I use both Autopano Pro and PTGui - in my experience you really need both. PTGui excels at preserving straight lines and architectural relationships. Autopano has a more intuitive interface and faster workflow. Sometimes one will simply refuse to stitch an image which the other gets right. I use them more or less on a trial and error basis.

In most cases you don't have to be super fussy about rotating on the axis of the entrance pupil - it only matters if there are foreground and background objects in multiple frames. You can often plan your shot around this issue. I stitch mostly handheld.

Both Autopano and PTGui give you more intuitive perspective corrections than PS. One reason to stitch is that the larger number of pixels gives you the capacity to do more extreme perspective corrections.

Extreme perspective correction (3 M8 images PTGui)

Click to view attachment

Foreground isolated in one frame (2 M8 images PTGui)

Click to view attachment

PTGui choked on this one, even after I added manual control points. Autopano handled it ( 2 H3D 39 images)

Click to view attachment

My experience is that ptgui is faster than autopano, both in editing and final rendering. For example the yaw,pitch,roll choice in autopano should be changed by numbers(so they call it numerical transmition..)and you see your result really slow after changing the numbers. while ptgui use just the mouse dragging, left button for yaw and pitch right button for roll. much quicker and easier.

I've been encountering problems with autopano when I try to blend a 16000*10000image, use smartblend, 3layers,which unexpected shut down every time, so I change smartblend to multiband and solve the problem. Anyway with ptgui I never encountered such problems.

OK, I'm a bit of a stitching newbie, so excuse me for what may be a stupid question, but I'm sitting here a little stumped.

I'm using CS3 merge to put these 6 images together.

Click to view attachment

But it appears to be missing the 1st two frames of the series in the final result

Click to view attachment

I'm having a good fiddle around, but can't seem to get it to use them.

When taking the shots I made sure each one overlapped the other by at least 1/4.

What don't I know / am I doing wrong?

Help much appriciated.

There seems to be minimal overlap between image 3 & 4. Maybe that is where PS drops the ball. There is also minimal overlap between 2&3.

I would have taken a bit more overlap than this on each shot. You are making it very hard for PS to set proper connection points.

Did you take this with a wide angle? It appears you did. when looking at the different angles lines have between the shots that should end-up straight with each other in the final shot. When using wide-angles it is even more adviced using the nodal point to rotate.

When not using a nodal slider, I generally take a lens that doesn't distort much (eg. 50mm on 35 & 100mm on MF).

If I do use wide angle I am also struggling with my nodal slider BTW

I have had this email conversation with RRS about the engravings on their nodal slider. They don't see the necessity to start counting mm's from the place where the sensor/film sits


edit: on second thought (look) you did not do this with wide angle most parts line up pretty well so PS should not have difficulties doing this provided you have enough overlap.

Hi Neil,

Looks like a roof-top image of Zurich :-)

I think the problem is the 3rd image ("3.jpg"). Looks to me like there is very little or no overlap for stitching between image 3 and 4.


I don't use CS3 for stitching I use PTGui. This shot might be rescued if you can use PTGui (or realviz/autopano) to manually place some anchor points between image 3 and 4. Assuming there is ofcourse some overlap...


Andy

Well, I guess Andy gave the second part of advice I was just about to type

Thanks guys.

I think you're right. I think the problem probably is the overlap between 3 & 4. You obviously really do need a fair chunk.
I shall re shoot it now & report back.

It's shot on an RZ with a 110 lens, so no wide angle.

(But I am thinking of trying one next week on a Cambo Wide! (35mm lens))

And yes andy, it's the view from my kitchen balcony in Zurich

Thanks again.

It was the overlap - Thanks.

Re- shot with almost half of each image overlapping.

Click to view attachment

Sorry I never saw your post till today. Thanks for the kind words. Actually the site is almost two years out of date and I need to spend some time updating it. Generally I do stitching with segments from T/S lenses (24, 35 PC, 45, and 90) so perspective problems are not an issue. I use stitching to gain a wider perspective, build pixel size and do panoramas.