Tim have you tried the gigapan head?
On Tue, May 6, 2014 at 10:49 AM, Tim Mulholland <tim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I'm slow in responding, too.I was shooting film panoramas for years with a Fuji G617 and have now moved on to using my Pentax 645D. In the past year I probably created a thousand panoramic images using Photoshop's Photomerge utility. As others have mentioned, it is rare for me to get a "level" shot. In fact, I can't recall the last time that my shot was level. I just don't even worry about it any more. For what it's worth, I'm primarily a landscape photographer and last year was living in New Zealand and was shooting, shooting, shooting...When I'm shooting for panos, I usually overlap by at least 50% if not more; it's usually on the order of 75% - to be explained later. If the light is good enough for handholding, I'll handhold, but usually I'll work on my tripod - and my results are seldom level. Additionally, there are nearly always perspective and distortion issues that I'll address in postprocessing.My photomerge workflow goes one of two ways. I load all of the images that I've taken into Lightroom as raw files. In LR, I will choose the images that I want to turn into a pano, mark them with a particular color, and then "select" those images and use LR's "export to panorama" feature (>Photo>Edit In>Merge to Panorama in Photoshop). In several seconds, the Photomerge window opens in Photoshop and I'll usually select "auto" for the layout, select "blend images together," select "vignette removal,"and select "geometric distortion correction," and let 'er rip. When the pano is created, I'll usually save the file and then come back and edit it later (or, I may just edit it now, if I'm only expecting to make one or two panos).My second method for creating a panos is even better. :) When I'm working, I'm usually shooting hundreds of images, some for single images and many to be (hopefully) turned into panos. After I load the images into LR, I'll go through everything and mark which images I want to turn into panos. I might mark them up all at once and then export them to a new directory in this second method, or I'll mark up one pano and then export it to a new directory, and then repeat. After these directories are created, I'll open Photoshop. Here's the beauty - I've "created" (actually, I did a lot of research and copied & modified the work of others) a "panorama script" in PS. I've programmed the script for auto layout, blending, vignette removal and distortion correction. When the script starts, I just point it to these new directories that I've created with all of the individual images, and now I really let 'er rip. I can walk away from my computer for the minutes/hours it takes it to create all of these pano files. I've created up to twenty pano files at a time like this, letting the computer run over lunch time or at night. (If you're interested in the script, I'll gladly email it to you - please respond to ME, not the list. *BUT, I'm too busy to tell you how to install it, set it up, and use it; you'll have to go onto the PS scripts forum and figure it out - sorry. But, the effort that you invest in learning how to really use it will be invaluable for your specific computing and workflow needs.*)Post-processing of Panos: The files that I've created are usually huge. In fact, some of my files have to be saved using PS's large file format (.psb) because they're >2 gb, as I'm usually working with 16-bit raw, psd and tiff files. Therefore, every bit of RAM is nice.I'll open my pano file in PS and it will usually be curved and/or not level. The "curving" is just a distortion, frequently from using a wide-angle lens. My first significant effort is to "straighten" this distortion. I'll select the whole image and then perform a warp transform of the image (>Edit>Transform>Warp). From there, I push and pull the image around until it looks/feels right. At this stage, I'm not trying to level the image; I'm just nudging the image to make everything look right. After committing to the transform, I'll save the image, usually as a .psd.I'll then import the image into LR and do my final edits - leveling, levels, cropping, color adjustments, etc. I may do these edits first (if I'm feeling lucky/cocky) but I usually do this next step first. I need to inspect the image at 100% for several issues. My images are usually aligned decently, but I'll keep an eye open for that. My biggest issue is that one (or more) particular frame of the pano may be blurry because I've not stopped moving sufficiently while creating my pano, and this is more common if I've not used my tripod. I'm also on the lookout for "motion discrepancies" - waves that aren't lined up; moving tree branches; moving people. A third major issue that I'll be looking for, particularly if I used a wide-angle lens and polarizer is the uneven polarization across the individual frame that causes sky banding in a stitched landscape pano. Finally, I'm also looking for transformation errors where I've nudged the image too much one way or another so that aspects that should be parallel, for example, aren't parallel, or there should be obvious parallax, but there isn't.Now, here's why I overlap so much. There may be a pano whose potential I really, really like, but I've killed it because of a poor frame. I'll rerun Photomerge but I'll first figure out which individual frame(s) was bad and eliminate it from the second run. Since I've overlapped so much, I can usually leave out a frame and still have a decent pano, but not always.Additionally, these I'll shoot extra frames if I'm using a polarizer so that I can minimize/eliminate sky banding. I may have a significant exposure/color gradient in the sky over the frame due to the use of the polarizer, but not banding, if I use many frames. For the large exposure/color gradient over the entire frame, I'll add in a gradient with LR to try to reduce that issue.Finally, when I'm in a pano shooting situation that clearly involves movement, like moving people, I'll make certain to center one of my frames on the moving people so that Photoshop or me can be certain to select for the frame that singularly captures the movement. But, if there are crowds of moving people, it's hit and miss whether I'll be able to address the movement issue.My $0.02 worth,Tim!Tim Mulholland/Illuminata PhotoFitchburg, WIMy camera, my experience, my creativity - your eyes, your memories, your emotions...
On May 5, 2014, at 10:01 PM, List for Photo/Imaging Educators - Professionals - Students <photoforum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:RE: Digital Panorama Stitching Software
