I am looking for advice not on the post portion of the pano but technique for the pictures them self. I recently did a 5 shot by rotating the camera on the tripod and cannot get them to line up quite right. I was using a 24mm lens on a crop body.
So tips on how the shots should be taken to have the most success?
As far as shooting goes, if there are no foreground elements, you can shoot handheld. Just make sure that there is about 20% overlap between frames. I've successfully stitched panos that had about 1 % (one percent) overlap between frames but it require a little guidance to the stitcher.
These days I'm using Hugin for excellent results for multi-row HDR panos.
I've stitched 10 mm vertical panels and stitched shots at 400 mm, and everything in between, no problems.
The one I am having problems with is weird. Plenty of overlap in files. The pic is of a lake, and everything looks fine except the distant shore line. It should be a nice horizontal line, but pieces do not line up correctly no matter what I do.
I am liking Hugin as well. Have also tried it with PTGui and Microsoft ICE.
Juan Francisco wrote:
The one I am having problems with is weird. Plenty of overlap in files. The pic is of a lake, and everything looks fine except the distant shore line. It should be a nice horizontal line, but pieces do not line up correctly no matter what I do.
I am liking Hugin as well. Have also tried it with PTGui and Microsoft ICE.
It could be the panoramic Projection you are using.
In Hugin you have a choice of about 20. Usually either Rectilinear or Cylindrical or Equirectangular will do it for you. I think I had a problem with a wavy horizon once in Cylindrical and switched to Rectilinear and that fixed it.
You also have the Optimizer tab available which has Pitch, Yaw, and Roll controls (Roll might help), though I've never had to use them.
MikeW wrote:
Can Hugin work with raw files or just jpg?
Anything except Raw. I use and recommend 16 bit TIFF for the finest work. I convert the Raw with only the most basic adjustments (applied uniformly to all the images), merge the HDR pano in Hugin and tell it to output the finished 16 bit TIFF plus a 16 bit TIFF for each exposure layer (fully stitched). Then I do fine tuning in Photoshop CS 2 or even merge the exposure layers to HDR there.
If you must insist on a JPEG only workflow, you can input and output JPEGs.
Juan and Mike, I published a short tutorial on pano stitching (the way I do it) in my blog.
You are welcome to leave your opinions - whether it works for you or not.
