My first panorama shot

[Richard D]

From the Sacred Valley in Peru



I'd love a critique/advice or two or more.

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

1. pretty good... do it in photoshop?

or something else?

[JeffR]

2. That's excellent, Richard.

I've strained my eyes trying to find the seams, and I can't see them.

Can you tell us how you did this? I'd be very interested to hear more.

[Richard D]

3. Photoshop CS4

It has an automatic panorama function. Just feed in the shots and it matches them up quite seamlessly. It takes my computer, which is pretty fast, a couple minutes to do this, so the computing mathematics involved in doing it so perfectly must just be huge.

Then I cropped out the parts that were missing on the tops and bottoms of some of the frames and did some patching up for a few areas. It needed this because the individual frames were hand-held and not perfectly able to be alligned.

I started off with Raw files so the final tiff file was huge. I don't remember where it was, youtube I think, where I saw a tutorial on how to do it. I think next time I'm someplace that is worthy of a panorama I'll do portrait shots instead of landscape and do HDR for each frame first, then patch them into a panorama. Use a tripod too. That should look pretty cool.

Hope that's clear. It's late and I'm tired and might be a little incoherent.

[Fumesucker]

4. That looks very nice..

Absolutely stunning scenery.

I have several panorama softwares, an old version of Photoshop Elements I got with a scanner quite a few years ago does a decent job, surprisingly, newer versions don't seem to have it.

Just about every Canon digital camera comes with a surprisingly good panorama software, Photostitch, on the support disk. A lot of Canon point 'n shoot cameras also come with a function specifically tailored to make panorama shooting easier. I may get a cheapie used Canon just for that function.

Putting the camera in portrait position works but it makes the job of the software more difficult and it's harder to get a seamless panorama that way. Getting the right amount of overlap seems to be fairly important, too little overlap and the software can't deal with it as well, too much and the software sometimes doesn't know what to do with it.

HDR in portrait mode should make for an astounding panorama.

[dbmk]

5. There are other options out there

Autostitch:
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html
Its free, absolutely limited and a no frills GUI. :) It is also not perfect - but for most tasks its more than up to the task.

AutoPano:
http://www.autopano.net/
Costs, but it enhances the magic level a few times.

They both correct perspective distortion and exposure levels. Autopano is just a good bit better at it.

Haven't tried Photoshops solution, but I will try and give that a run one of these days.

Autostich - had some problems I could not make it get rid of on left on a ridge edge:
http://www.dabomb.dk/US08/DeathValley_DantesPoint_Panorama_02_Final_25p
Autopanos result on the same pictures:
http://www.dabomb.dk/US08/DeathValley_DantesPoint_Panorama_03_Final_25p
(add .jpg to the URLS. They are rather large in file and screensize so I dont want to include them here - and you can't make links to jpgs)

[Mira]

6. That does look sacred. I know nothing about "stitching together" but I know a

bit about Peru :)
The edge in the front probably drops all the way down to the Urubamba river. A treacherous body of water that runs fast and kills.
As this photo is finished and assembled, is it grouped? I would simply love to see the weight on the right reduced a little bit, if you can.
Straightening it by lifting up the left side just a couple of tiny degrees.

[Richard D]

7. Thank you

It's much easier than that. You just open up the automate tab on photoshop and hit panorama. It opens up a dialogue box where you load the pictures in. It's all automatic after that.

I'm not sure what you mean by reducing the weight on the right side?

Yes, that's exactly where it was taken. From the "agricultural research" site, which is pretty amazing. It's about mid-way down the sacred valley on the way to Ollantaytambo from Pisac.

[Mira]

8. It makes me hold my breath, just to think about that place ! So High, So Special.

What I mean, and it's utterly my idiotsyncracy, is that I wish the entire photo were a little straighter by tilting the left side up a couple of degrees maximum, therefore the right side would lower a hair and it would balance better.
But I could be SOOO wrong !

When I was there, all my photos were slides. Pre-digital days.
I think people scan slides and then process them on the PC. Is that right?

[Richard D]

9. It really is amazing

I'll have to take a look at it on a bigger screen than my laptop. I can fit the whole picture on the screen, but then it's so small I can't see it well.

You can scan or have slides scanned into digital. I think if you look around you can find some places that do it for not tons of money. It's something I need to do someday since I have boxes of aging slides that have already lost some color.

[Fumesucker]

10. If your camera has a good macro mode it's pretty easy to shoot slides that way

I used to put them up against my monitor with an area set to bright white and just shoot the slides in macro mode, works pretty well actually and it's a great deal faster than scanning slides.