Interactive Panorama

[mattb]

I shot a 22 image 360 panorama from a 13,058 Ft. peak, Mt. Owen on Sunday. It stitched together pretty nicely but I wanted a better way to display it. After some Googling I came across a cool free site called Dermandar that will make a zoomable, panable panorama from your file. The resolution is greatly reduced from the 283.5 MP original but it's still pretty neat.

Click on the static image below to check out the interactive version which I have embedded on my blog. I couldn't figure out how to embed it here.
Once there you can drag to pan and scroll to zoom. Click the arrow in the upper right to go full screen. Cool!

[mattb]

Oops, if anyone clicked the link and didn't get what you were expecting I realized I had forgotten to check the "Publish" box so it was only visible to me. D'oh! Fixed now.

[Don Schaeffer]

Wonderful. Breathtaking view.

[wfooshee]

Interesting. My stitch software can make Quicktime 360 files, but hosting sites try to "fix" and compress those rather than simply hosting the file. I wonder what Dermandar will do with those, or if it will want me to recreate from the original frames.... I'll have to check that out when I get a chance.

[Liz]

This is really cool, Matt. Did it take a long time? A lot of work?

BTW, great shots too!

Liz

[mattb]

Interesting. My stitch software can make Quicktime 360 files, but hosting sites try to "fix" and compress those rather than simply hosting the file. I wonder what Dermandar will do with those, or if it will want me to recreate from the original frames.... I'll have to check that out when I get a chance.

I did a little bit of research and found that QTVR is considered a dying format that Apple is no longer developing. I'm also a Windows user and I hate having to install QT plugins that try to steal all my file associations so I didn't want to go there. I was trying to be as platform independent as possible while still staying low cost or preferably free.
This site will accept individual images and stitch them for you but I wanted more control so I did the stitch myself beforehand and uploaded it as one big jpeg.

[mattb]

Thanks Don and Liz!

Liz, it wasn't a lot of work once I figured out the workflow but getting there kept me up too late for a couple of nights. The hike to get there was a five hour round trip but taking the photos was only a few minutes. I had to be sure my tripod was level but once I was set I tried to get all those frames pretty quickly so the light wouldn't change between frames. I exposed for the brightest part of the scene and used Lightroom's Sync to apply all the same adjustments to them all. I stitched with Microsoft I.C.E. after a failed attempt in Photoshop with RAW files which took a long time and then produced a panorama that was over 2 GB so I couldn't save it. I backtracked from there and exported individual jpegs and then stitched them with ICE which worked well and much quicker than Photoshop.
Once I had the big panorama file I just had to resize it and upload to Dermandar.

Knowing all that now it would take me a lot less time to do another one! I'm also a software engineer so I'm pretty comfortable problem solving on computers. I think that helps a bit!

[Liz]

Knowing all that now it would take me a lot less time to do another one! I'm also a software engineer so I'm pretty comfortable problem solving on computers. I think that helps a bit!

Yes! I would agree being a software engineer would at least make it more fun than work!

At any rate, looking at the end result, it was well worth it all! :thumbsup:

Liz