[aardbat]

I am not sure where I went wrong, but the horizon looks funny. I want it to be straight, but I am not sure whether it is Microsoft ICE or the fact that my camera was not level when I shot the picture.

Do I use the inbuilt rotation function in ICE, or do I do something in lightroom first to the individual pictures before stitching?

Attached Images

 

[hawkeye86]

Looks to me like the water on the left side is quite level along with the ground to the right of it. Then the ground slopes up slightly from the center of the frame to the right edge. IMO you did everything right and there is nothing the software would improve without also tilting the water on the left. This is a nice capture with a huge dynamic range. Maybe too huge. I'd like to see it taken with the sun on this side of the mountains. Where were you btw?

[panoguy]

If your camera is not level when shooting the panorama, it will have a "wavy" or dropping horizon. The most efficient place to fix this is in the stitching program (if MS ICE provides a tool for this), or afterwards in a Photoshop with a tremendous amount of effort (and a very big warp grid). Almost every stitching program I have used (I see 6 in my Applications folder) has a horizon correction feature, and they work to varying degrees, but the secret is to level the camera first and keep it level throughout the panning...

BTW, to answer your question about "what to do now" you only have to make a minor correction to get a straight horizon based on the water (hawkeye is right, that is a hill on the right). If you look at the pink edges, you can see just how much I warped your image in Photoshop to correct the wave.

[aardbat]

Oh, I did not remember that the ground slopes upwards in the right hand side, which is why it looked funny to me. I was hand panning all our panaromas because we don't have a tripod. There is also a joining problem between the centre and right frames, because of the dynamic range, hopefully if I play with the exposure of the right frame and then redo the stitch it will be better. The jpeg atm is very very dark because of the sun, but ICE does not take DNG files. I will try and do the horizon correction if I can find it in ICE.

The picture is of Karakul lake in Tajikistan. Unfortunately while we were there it was very much fine weather in the morning, and bad in the afternoon. In fact, that day we were caught in a snowstorm. But I very much wanted the sun flare in the picture because I was trying to capture the sun peeking out of mountains dusted with virgin snow. Thank you for your comments, they were very helpful.

[clackers]

Convert the DNG files to TIF, getting the exposures consistent before stitching together in ICE.

Harder to recover details from JPEG highlights and shadows.

[hawkeye86]

Oh, my. This lake is almost 14,000 feet above sea level and you're still looking up at the mountains! What an incredible journey this must have been for you. Any other pictures you could share with us "low-landers"?

[dmfw]

If you can not get it right with ICE, you might try Hugin (Hugin - Panorama photo stitcher). It is free, has many options, but is not as easy to use an other Pan. programs