Disaster

[GB1]

Tried to merge 7 photos together using both Corel PhotoPaint and Photoshop's tools. Both are disasters. Displayed are PS' results... pretty bad

Not sure how to do this - has anyone had any success creating pano shots? I used film. I left about 10-20% overlap on each side. A friend and I have come up with some possible problem areas:

- Slide slightly tilted/askew in the slide mounting or holder while scanning.
- Slight change in sky/clouds between shots
- Distortion on the sides of the image (barrel or pincushion)
- Heat distortion of the film inside the scanner when scanning, or distortion for another reason

Photoshop's tool is highly automated where Corel's is mostly manual, with GUI tools to help you. But haven't had any luck with either.

GB

[Dylan8i]

my canon has a stich feature that works really really well. however a few things that i've noticed help better, is to rotate the camera from a single point ( or use a tripod), maintain the same settings through out the entire shot ( required by my program), and take the shots quickly to prevent movemnt of the scene.


it looks like your pano has the same problem in each panel, jus tto the left of the right edge has a dark strip, either from your camera or from scanning ( i'd guess scanning). an option would be to just post edit that section lighter and feather it together with the other shot. how ever it looks like a different problem form the far right photo and the next one to the left of it, as the rocks are different colors, and don't l ine up at all.
mine usually end up being wider on the far left and right side, or bulge out in the middle, but hardly ever stay close to even dimensions through out the entire thing, which could be 1 problem here.

[schrackman]

I was having the same problem with my Digital Rebel, but Saturday I tried something different...I shot in manual mode and kept the exposurs the same for every frame. This is only a stitching of two photos but it came out much better than I had anticipated. Next time I'll do four frames to see how well this works. I used photostitch that came with my Canon software.

[schrackman]

Okay, my pic didn't load...

[Dylan8i]

heres a panoramic i did with my canon 1s is from bryce. it was 6 photos individually (with my 3.2 mp camera) and about 5 mb total after stitched however photobucket compresses to 1 mb :-(.


my sititched these hoodoos together no problem and i cropped off the jagged edges... i can show you the steps ( individual pics, combined w/o crop) if you wish.

[mjs1973]

I have had these same problems using the panorama feature in PS and the one that came with my Canon software. Gettng the exposures to look the same at the time of capture is key also.

If you're serious about panoramas, you might want to look into The Panorama Factory software. You can download a 30 trial version of their software for free and see if it works better than what you are using now. I did that a while ago, and I thought the results were pretty good. I didn't think I would use it enough to justify the cost tho, so I didn't purchase the software. (The trial version will watermark your image with the companies logo).

Here is a link to a thread with my first every panoramic image. I did this all manually with PS5. It took many many hours to do, but I was happy with the final results. The links in that thread don't take you where they use to so you can't see a larger version or the original images I started with. To give you an idea, this was taken durning mid day with very gray sky's, and my exposures were all over the place. All images were taken hand held also.

[GB1]

Dylan - Thanks for the tips. I did mount my camera on a tripod and leveled the tripod before I took the shots. However, I used aperature priority and it therefore could have changed exposure as I rotated it (as the scenes' illuminances were surely a little different). I think I snapped them all in less than a minute. But with the wind blowing the clouds around, that probably isn't fast enough.

I see what you mean about the dark panel on the right sides of the photos, but I think that's caused by the software's blending function - there's overlap there, and getting the two to merge would require some automatic density adjustments. I've no idea on the way they do it but it definitely seems darker. I could feather it, see how it works. Of course that is basically doing all the work myself, sad that the s/w won't help out on that

Your pano looks great btw - post the steps if you can.

Schrackman - I'll try the manual exposure at the same settings idea. Also, I"ll try an indoor experiment too. That way the lighting won't change. Maybe that will help. I do have the Canon s/w too btw but I am not sure it works with non-Canon shots? Your pano looks decent too.. Just a very very slight density change in the blue sky.. probably only noticable if you are looking for it.

Michael - Thanks. I'll try The Panorama Factory. The link to the pano you posted, the photo's a bit small to really examine how it merged... I used the linking function to a PhotoBucket account for the one here to get around the 640 px limit.

I think it's time for a few indoor, controlled lighting experiments to narrow down the list of potential problems................

GB

[Dylan8i]

ok here goes for a simple how to. i figured screen shots would work best, *edit- made pics 50% smaller*

using canon photostitch select the images you want to combine, and start photostitch (or open the program and load the pictues in).

it should then look like this:



so those are my 5 images i took with my camera set to the photostitch option ( i'm going to play around tonight and see if it actually needs to be set on it to work).


then once you arrange them in the proper order by clicking and dragging on the images, hit merge and there are some other options... for these kind it shoudl be set correctly so hit merge. i then hit show merge lines and this is what my screen looks like:



so you can see where the photos over lap, and now you can see how well the photos mesh as well. these fit very good and have very little wasted space ( notice how flat teh top and bottom lines of the photo is.

the next step is to hit the save tab and it then lets you crop it to include all the image or only partions. it begins with the green rectangle to include the most photo area with out including any of the white outside the photots. and should look like this:



after that hit save and it saves it like the photo i posted above ( however the one posted was dramitacally downsized as the original was almost 6 mb).


hope this helps, i'm not sure how to do it in photoshop, but maybe someone else could make a how to for that program as well.

[mud]

using canon photostitch

I have to say that I've had good luck with this program as well. The following small version is contrived from six handheld shots (with a good bit of overlap.)

Good luck

[Dylan8i]

i just confirmed that it can stitch "normal" photos together with no problem. i tried it with 3 photos on manual setting so the shutter and apature were the same for each.

[mjs1973]

Michael - Thanks. I'll try The Panorama Factory. The link to the pano you posted, the photo's a bit small to really examine how it merged... I used the linking function to a PhotoBucket account for the one here to get around the 640 px limit.

Yup, I was at work when I posted that, and the old thread was the only version I had access too. I will see if I can dig up a bigger version, and the originals that I started with to give you a better idea of how much I had to change the images to get them to blend together.

[GB1]

Dylan - Well, tried it with my Canon Photostitch program (I have a Canon point-and-shooter) and it turned out insanely confused, looks worse than the posted image I think it just might be because the exposures are slightly different on each, not being set to manual.

Time for me to do more experiments and confirm this.

Thanks everyone!

GB

[Dylan8i]

yeah, try just taking a sample few images ( i used the wall in my room) make sure they over lap about 20% and then try it) after you see how its done once you start to learn how to shoot the pics to make them turn out better.

[mjs1973]

Ok, here are the original jpegs that I started with for my first pano, and the final. It's not perfect, but I was happy with the results. All work done manually in PS5. Oops, I forgot the sky photo... the sky was done with a single photo, stretched across the entire image.

[jlange6648]

Michael,
That is some amazing work! especially looking at your base photos!

-Jeff

[Dylan8i]

that does look very nice, however the sky does look alitte stretched, it might work better on a pano not so long.


but looks great. the start photos arn't teh same exposure either, but with how much work you did making it silouetted and stuff it didn't really matter.

[GB1]

Yes, it appears that the exposures weren't even close on some of the shots, but it didn't make any difference. I like how you touched up the sky and added the 'heat' effect - looks like a few SciFi movies I have seen (good ones).

However, since you did this in PS5, it doesn't explain why it didnt work for me in PS CS. :crazy: I need to get out there and shoot some more and narrow down the possible problems.

Also, another member here named DennyLee60 (whom I work with) took out his digital D50 and tried some shots and was also unsuccessful. I guess the film vs digital possibility isn't so much of a factor....

GB