Hello all,

I am off to camp at the eastern edge of the Rift Valley next week, and the scenery there just cries out for panoramics. However I have never shot panoramics before and I wonder if anyone could point me in the direction of any good "how to" advice. I shoot with a 5D and have a tripod with ballhead setup. Specifically:

- Which type of lenses are best - wide, tele, or standard 50mm?
- Exposure techniques - I assume this should be done manually, each shot with the same settings, using ETTR?
- Panning technique - do I have to keep the horizon in the middle of the frame?
- What software? I have LR2.5, I don't have Photoshop (and nor am I going to get it just for this), and somewhere I have a CD for something called Photostitch which came with my 5D. Is this any good?
- What is the best editing workflow?

I'd appreciate any pointers. Thanks!

Ed

On a 5D, I would say that a 60-70 mm lens is often a good comprise for general pano work. Lack of light fall should be a high priority in selecting such a lens.



Indeed.



Parallax will be a problem if you have near objects in the frame and simply shoot with a regular head. Panoramic heads make it possible to locate the camera on top of the nodal point of the lens for parallax free shooting. They will also enable you to point up or down without tilting the camera left or right which will reduce problems.

Without one of these, position you tripod in such a way that the based supporting the head is horizontal, then rotate using the rotating based of your head if you have one.



Mostly crap, Autopano pro is the best option for somebody like you.



Shoot -> convert from raw to tiff in your normal raw conversion software -> autopano pro for pano work -> you typical retouching app for final re^touch.

One quick sample for the road...



Regards,
Bernard

Ed- check this out for the Mac.

http://www.arcsoft.com/public/software_tit...&dyContent=


--Dave

Hi

I have some article on the issue: http://83.177.178.241/ekr/index.php/photoa...a-and-stitching

There was a lot of good discussion on LL forum starting from that article:

http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index....showtopic=36973

Best regards
Erik

Hi,

I hope you enjoy your trip!

Se response below

Best regards
Erik

Same recommendations as Bernard's
I'd add that unless shutter speed is not ok for handheld work you don't need a tripod. Shooting handheld or from a tripod without a pano head is exactly the same regarding the panoramic work as long as the shutter speed being used is ok for handheld operation.
Make sure you overlap generously between shots, I'd say 30% or 40% this will help the pano software assemble the pano without many errors.
Check Hugin as a free software option for pano work that is miles ahead of PS, if you want to buy something then PtGui pro, PtAssembler are also options.

Thanks everybody - I really appreciate the guidance from people who so evidently know what they are talking about. If I remember I will post the resultant pano on this forum after I have gotten back from the Rift Valley.





OK - my takeaway from this is that I don't have to be too anal about pano-heads etc provided my subject is in the distance (which it will be). Of course for landscapes I prefer to shoot on a tripod anyway for simple IQ reasons.

I'll look at Hugin tonight before getting the credit card out.

Didn't see this mentioned, but since you asked - yes, don't forget to put your camera in Manual exposure mode, and use the same exposure settings for each image. If you're in A or S or P or... mode, you may end up with different exposures and this will definitely show up when you try to stitch the images together. Do a quick pan through the image to find out what the best exposure is without blowing out the highlights.

I have Hugin and I like it MOST of the time, but for difficult stitches I prefer Autopano Pro.

Mike.

If you are on a non pano head tripod make sure to get an L bracket to shot in portrait orientation. (what a stupid tip ah?)

Great tips all!

Let me add manual focus to the list.

And sometimes the dynamic range in the panorama is too large to capture. It would then make sense to bracket each shot - see my explanation here.

Mark

1. My first advice is be careful with advices.

2. There are quite a few aspects of creating panoramas; they need to be understood, not to be learnt. I find it strange, that you did not make at least some tries of panoramas before going on such a trip.

3. Shooting each frame with the same setting and striving for ETTR are incompatible in most settings.

True enough for some images, especially if shooting into the sun. As Mark suggested, bracketing is a good idea - PTGui and Autopano Pro for example will work with multiple exposures of each image.

Mike.

It is always good to use pan head.
Arun Gaur

http://tripolia-indianlandscapeimages.com

True, but the trick is to be able to distinguish between the good and the bad. Better to ask and reject than not to ask at all.




Er, I think you missed the tense here. I'm going in a week from now. Future tense. Of course, I will do some test shots of garden, house etc before I go. I don't see what is so strange about asking advice from people who know before trying out a new technique. One has to start somewhere.



That's interesting. I would have thought that the thing to do would be to pick the individual frame with the highest highlights, find the ETTR exposure for that particular frame, and then use that manual exposure for each frame in the scene. In other words, ETTR for the whole scene.

Yes, but if you're creating a panorma of a large area, especially if you're shooting into the sun, your 'proper' exposure can vary by more than five or six or eight stops. So if you set your exposure for the highlights in the brightest part of the scene, once you get out to the periphery you might find that your image is mostly black at that exposure. It's really scene dependent. Here's an example where I exposed for the clouds on the right, which kept some detail in the sunset on the left, but I had to let the foreground mountains drop to black. I didn't have time to bracket here because the light was changing so fast.

Click to view attachment

Mike.

Mike

That's still a nice shot, even if the mountain is clipped...

I would be interested to know the workflow if you do bracket. I understand that each panoramic should be assembled from shots taken at the same exposure. So do you make several panoramics from each of the bracket levels and then do some kind of HDR from the resulting set of panoramics?

Thanks


Ed

Hi!

That was the approach I used initally. Nowdays I often just shot on automatic. Modern stitchers can handle both approaches. You may try both!

Best regards
Erik

Depends on the software, but if you're using Autopano Pro for example, and let's say you've got nine images to stitch and 3 exposures of each, you just lump all 27 images together and let the software figure it out. Does a good job.

Mike.

OK, as promised (or should that be threatened?) I attach an attempt at a pano from the weekend. The original is a 37MP monster.

Click to view attachment

Excellent job - I particularly love what is going on in the sky - the clouds, the rays, the rain showers in the distance.

Andrew

Safari Njema Ed!

edit: I see youve been already, hope it was awesome.

Thanks, and yes it was awesome. You may know the area: go on Magadi Road past Kiserian, turn left at Corner Baridi, go along Champagne Ridge about 5km and you're there. The place was just next door to Richard Leakey's house. Amazing that we can still find places like this less than 1 hours drive from Nairobi.

Am I making you homesick?

Ed

you're abolutely *killing* me haha

I used to watch the rally at corner baridi when I was a kid, beautiful country down that way.

Nicely done!

Mike.

When shooting panos in rapidly changing light levels light like the minutes around sunset, best approach is to shoot from darkest side to brightest side. That sometimes buys you enough time to bracket, by the time you get to the bright side it will be down quite a bit and more in balance with the earlier dark side.

This year I have really done a lot of panos, esp. during a visit to Orkney (a group of isles in the North of Scotland). Those islands are quite flat, so pano works well.

One often reoccuring problem though, is when photographing scenes with waves. You often cannot get a believable line of waves, cf the example

details: Rollei and 50mm lens (lots of overlap in the shots), CS3 photomerge.

Any solutions?

BTW, vertical stitching makes me return to the square, I used a lot in the film days. No wave problems here:

(sorry for the dust visible, images still not ready for publishing...)

1. I see stitching error in the example; that needs to be corrected before the waves.

2. Your example is not a really bad case; it can be much worse.

Anyway, one has to use a product, which allows for manual intervention between warping and blending (PTAssembler, PTGui, Hugin). The "stitcher"does not create a pano but warps the individual sources, which will be blended together by a special program, like Enblend and Smartblend. Both processes can be performed, and the tangible areas repaired afterwards through overlaying by corrections created from the output of the warping process.

One possible solution is to cut a region over the seam from the overlapping warped frames and making a masked transition between them, usually from left to right. The problem is, that the result will be muddy; if the waves were clear, this is very noticable.

The other solution is the zig-zagging; much more labour. The result can be excellent, though it does not always work. The condition is, that the overlapping frames' darkness must match - but that should always be so (I never let the stitcher adjust the darkness). Larger but very regular waves can not be repaired this way.

1. The initial state, after blending:



2. One of the two adjacent warped, unblended frames is copied over the other, with 50% opacity to show the overlapping areas:



3. Most of the overlapping water surface is selected (here with polygonal lasso), the selection inverted and deleted from both layers (the background layer has to be copied for this). The opacity of the top layer can be restored now. (I named the two layers "LeftSide" respectively "RightSide", in order to avoid mixing them up.):



4. Now, the zig-zag selection: start in one corner, go accross close to the other edge, and back, of course somewhat lower (if started in the upper corner):



The starting point dictates, from which layer what has to be kept. I started at the left edge; I delete the selection from the right side frame and keep the selection from the left side frame (by inverting the selection and deleting it).

The selection from the left side frame is narrowing towards the right, the selection from the right side frame is narrowing towards the left.

The resulting layers are:





5. The right side needs to be cleaned up a bit:



6. and the image flattened (for convenience I selected both layers before flattening):



7. Now this selection will be copied over the blended pano, aligned and merged; that's easy.

Here is the final pano (after having repeated this process for most of the seams; one of them is not repaired):



(The horizontally posterization of the sky is due to the downsized graduation; the original sky was ugly, homogenous gray, I replaced it. There is no posterization in the full size.)

Wow. Superb tutorial, Panopeeper! That's an excellent solution to a very difficult problem. Thanks!

Peter

Thanks a lot - seems to be a lot of work, but worth it. I´ll try it on some of the problem panos!

The thanks belong to someone on the Panorama Tools Assembler forum, which is dedicated to panorama creation, excellent on every level. I learned the zig-zagging for several years ago there, I forgot who posted it. My contribution is only the tutorial, not the idea.