Stitching Photos

[gary_hendr]

If you’ve taken photos of huge landscapes or spectacular vistas, stitching various photos together will produce a wonderful panoramic view. When using photo stitching software, for the greatest amount of success, there are still a few things to remember:

1. Avoid Too Much Overlap
The more one photo overlaps with another, the harder your stitching software will have to work to match the images and the likelier it is that noticeable blurring may occur. This is especially the case if you are capturing lots of detail in the foreground or middle ground.
Digital camera users should also compensate for any differences between what you see in the viewfinder or on your LCD screen and what actually ends up appearing in the photo. Unless your camera has TTL (through the lens) image capture, and most don't, there will be some variation. Once you figure out what that variation is, it will be easy enough to compensate for it.

2. Maintain Height, Angle and Position
Use the same height and angle for each photo and take each photo from the same spot. Unless you are using a tripod, it will be difficult to be totally accurate with this. Simply remember that the more differentiation there is between the height and angle of each photo, the smaller your end product will end up being and the likelier it becomes that it will include distortion.

3. Balance Brightness
Since taking multiple shots of the horizon often means having the sun's light entering your camera at different angles and levels of intensity, the resulting photos will usually show the sky at dramatically different levels of brightness. While some difference is OK and even natural, it is better to balance brightness levels somewhat before stitching photos together.

[Trevor Ash]

I'm not sure I agree with much of this post except the height/angle part. The last part really depends on the stitching software you use as some do a very good job of that for you.

The first part about minimizing overlap I completely disagree with. I suppose it would depend on the stitching software you use but for most stitching software it's recommended to have as much as 30 percent overlap between two frames.

If you want to get started in panoramic photos here's some steps to take:

1. If shooting a horizontal pano, hold the camera in vertical orientation. Sure, you'll need more photos to cover the horiontal area but you'll get much more up and down in the scene. This helps combat any variations of camera angle you might have. Additionally, lens distortion will be less and the photos will stitch easier as a result.

2. Don't use a wide angle lens. Wide angle lenses will be more difficult to stitch than longer lenses because they have more barrel distortion. Once you get better at stitching with long lenses you can try your hand with wide angles. Don't make it hard of yourself whe you're just getting started

3. These are the important camera settings you'll need to have for the pano to look good and the images to stitch well:
-----You'll need to be able to lock the white balance across all frames.
-----You'll need to be able to lock the exposure across all frames (aperture needs to stay the same)
-----You'll need to be able to lock the focus across all frames.

4. The fewer foreground objects you have, the easier to stitch! When you first get started with pano's you'll probably have a hard time trying to stitch pano's with foreground and background objects. The reason is because of parallax errors. Don't know what parallax errors are? Try this experiment....With one eye closed, look at something that has a vertical line out in the distance, while looking at the line (with one eye still closed) hold your index finger in front of your eyes and point in straight up so that it's parralel with and blocking the line in the distance. Now turn your head left and right and watch the position of the line relative to your finger. That's parallax and that's what makes it so hard to stitch without reducing it when you take the shots.

5. Parallax can be reduced and more or less eliminated by rotating about the camera and not your body. Tripod's help with this A LOT.

6. Try to take the shots as quickly as possible. Anything that moves will cause you more work in the stitching process including clouds, trees, people, etc.

7. Visualise the entire pano before you take the pictures. Determine the brightest and darkest areas of the pano and set your exposure as you see best based on this information.

8. If there's a particular object that you know ahead of time would be hard to stitch if it were cut in the middle, then make sure to talk a shot of that object so that it fits in one shot. It's alwaus better to have more photos than less. Additionally, you might want to just make that object your starting point for the pano.....there's no reason you HAVE to go from right to left......or left to right. You can jump around if need to just be aware of rule 6.