[ranmar850]

I like playing with panorama stitches, and have tried a number of programs. I tend to take them hand held and generally get decent results if I follow the rules--overlap sufficiently , keep the same centreline all the way through, no focal length under , manual exposure and focus. However, as the light drops, hand held starts to show it's shortcomings. I have tried using a tripod a few times , and always have issues with the arc it describes, ie if you are tilted to catch the sky, you will naturally describe an arc as you pan, highest in the centre and lowest at each end. And the outer images will also be skewed outwards from the centre of the arc. This is an example, one I did last night. I use PTGui, which I consider to be a good program, but it took me an hour and a half just to get the result below. I refer to it as "altered reality" I had to go back into LR to straighten the worst images just to get this result, as the skewing just wouldn't let the outer images (12 in total) stitch, even when manual control points were added. But this introduced other issues, I think--gross mismatches in the sky and a couple off oddities on the horizon--what the hell is that small volcanic eruption on the far right? I had to remove one image just to get it to work at all



You can say this is a shortcoming in the stitching program, but handheld rarely gives me issues. The only thing I can think of is having the camera as close to level as possible, but this will mean a large amount of unwanted foreground and less of the sky , when the sky is really your focus. And going shorter on focal length just introduces other issues. I "could" go much longer FL and stitch vertically as well as horizontally, I suppose.
Camera K-x,lens Sigma 18-125 DC HSM, iso 200, F9, Focal length was about 40mm, from memory. Any suggestions?

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Last edited by ranmar850; 01-20-2015 at 07:02 PM. Reason: typo..

[Bruce Clark]

Hi

That has makings of a great panorama. A pity your program is messing up the clouds like that

I use photoshop elements for stitching and find it does a good job. It has options to correct for vignetting and perspective.

For best results a tripod is almost essential although I do a lot of hand held too. You can get a bubble spirit level to slot into your camera flash hot shoe to assist with levelling. This is not much use if you tilt the camera to vertical however. I often put the camera to vertical to capture a taller image with both ground and sky then crop the final result.
Manual everything, focus, exposure. Set exposure and focus and use same for all.
No Polarizing filter.
Overlap exposures by at least a third.

[interested_observer]

Good Evening,

That is a pretty nice panorama - excellent coloring and an interesting horizon.

Well, I can explain what you are seeing, why and suggest both a partial and a full solution. The controlling factor leveling of the head and the perpendicular that you are rotating about.

So, let me explain. The main culprit to your problem is the head on your tripod - be it ballhead, 3D pan head, or what ever. Most heads have the azimuth control on the bottom (or the base right above the tripod). When you go to pan, you are panning around the perpendicular axis to the level of the tripod. Thus, your tripod must be perfectly level, in order to pan level. Personally, I am a tad lazy, plus I can spend 15 minutes trying to level the ^%$#*! thing and it will still be off. Thus, I level via the ballhead. It works perfect. However the camera on top of the ballhead will be shooting level, but when you pan from the base, you will either be going up or down hill - your droop.

There are a couple of solutions. I'll call them a 2D solution (partial) and a 3D solution (full).

• 2D Solution - The key here is to get the azimuth base that allows you to rotate the camera and get it ABOVE the ballhead. What this allows is that when you level the ballhead, thereby providing a level base for the camera, the camera will essentially be sitting on the azimuth platform (that itself is now level), and will allow you to pan level. So if you are shooting level, everything is fine. Where do you find a setup like this. Well, there are a few ballheads that do this - the Arca Swiss P0, the Acratech GP, and the Uniqball. You can also get a panning clamp that can slide under your camera to do the same thing. Take a look at this link... (you might want to read the whole thing as it has a lot of information in it).

  • https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/22-pentax-camera-field-accessories/279529...sing-rack.html

  However, you are specifically asking about shooting level with the camera tipped up at an elevation. This 2D solution will work pretty well for panoramas that are about 90 degrees wide. Beyond that you are going to start to get some droop on either end. That is just spherical geometry at work. When you are shooting handheld, you are adjusting for all of this. The reason why you will get droop here is that, when you elevate the camera (tip it up for an elevated shot), you are essentially destroying your level panning base and thus the perpendicular axis that you are rotating around is no longer actually perpendicular to the horizon.

• 3D Solution - This builds on the 2D solution to a degree. As I wrote in the 2D solution, when you tip the camera up to gain additional sky, you are destroying your level base and especially your vertical perpendicular (that you are rotating about). The 3D solution will maintain the level base and allow you to tip the camera up in elevation, while maintaining a level base and true perpendicular axis to rotate around.
  
  What you need is a Panorama Head - something like a Nodal Ninja. There are quite a few out there to choose from. However, the key is that they need to be perfectly level - thus you mount them on a leveling base or leveling tripod or a ballhead. Level the ballhead out, and then the entire pano head rotates around a true level perpendicular axis. The pano head provides the additional independent ability to allow the camera then to tip up for an increase in elevation angle - without destroying the level base and perpendicular axis that it rotates around. Now you have the ability to shoot the sky level.

You are getting stitching bands. Just for grins, I would convert the frames to either JPG or TIFF and try Microsoft ICE (free download - just google it). It probably will not make a whole lot of difference, but it would be an interesting exercise.

How much time did you take from the first frame to the last frame?
_________________

This entire assembly will sit rather high, so a sturdy tripod is in order. Also, you can get the pano head with a mechanical rotator. This is a mechanical device that you can set an angular stop based on the angular field of view of your lens. This way you can just turn the entire assembly from shot to shot to shot with out looking through the viewfinder. You will also want to set a 2 second delay to let the mirror vibrations settle out (or lock the mirror up).

• Amazon.com: pano head

[RAART]

I heard about this software that it is working wonders and supposed to be better than Photoshop. Also they have panoramic heads but they are very expensive.

Autopano Pro | Panorama software for Windows, Mac, Linux | Kolor

http://www.kolor.com/image-stitching-software-autopano-giga.html

Might be helpful.

I will at some point purchase this software but not now...

[johnmb]

I use Panorama Maker software, which is cheap, easy to use and so far has worked very well for me, even with handheld photos. Regards, johnmb

[interested_observer]

There are quite a few stitching software utilities out there (along with a lot of review sites). They all do at least a pretty good job. Some do more or less than others, and they all have trial periods for you to use and evaluate. A couple of years ago, I started downloading a lot of trials and using them to try to figure out which one was best for me. I do have to say that the ones fro Kolor are excellent - however, I put off the decision until I decided to get a larger (more storage) and faster PC, which I am doing right now.

The banding effect is usually overcome by the stitching program. You can hand stitch or provide manual assistance in terms of tie points, but that gets to be really time consuming. The automatic tie point analysis and alignment is an excellent feature - especially with manual assistance/override. Kolor I have found is very good at this. There are some occasions where it did not work so well (very few) and I think that I have figured out what to do in these instances. All automatic programs will have occasions where they are not as good as your own eye.

At times I forget to go to manual and may not have the absolute perfect exposure across all the frames. Just about all the utilities do an excellent job at exposure blending. At times I also do bracketing while panning, along with shooting in RAW. Kolor I find, handles RAW formats (and does support Pentax format - yea), can stack bracketed frames, do tone mapping / stacking as well as stitching - automagically. That does save a lot of time and disk space. I have found that for the HDR stacks, I do better (at times) with using a specific HDR utility and stitch manually - but, I'll admit that I really am not an expert at using Kolor's user interface to its fullest extent in this regard.

The other thing that I have experimented with is linear stitching. That is where you physically move (panning linearly) along a line taking images - usually of buildings, rather than at one location and rotate around a single point. Kolor auto product (as opposed to their giga product) supports this.

I also like to shoot and stitch architecture, or downtown at night (blue hour). With this, I do get some strange buildings that due to the projections have the structures leaning in various directions. Kolors perspective control has done wonders in this respect. I also have a shift lens, and the stitching programs need to recognize this and adapt to its output.

So, I have pretty much decided to go with the auto product from Kolor, after I finish building the new PC (I forgot to buy eSATA cables with a 90 degree bend connector, so maybe this weekend I'll be done and can start loading software and moving images over).

Microsoft ICE does a wonderful job - especially for free. It does not offer all the automation and specialized support for a lot of the wide ranging off-nominal situations. There are other products that do somethings a bit better or differently, or offer other types of specialization - but for one stop shopping, the Kolor products do quite well.

There is a lot of excellent experience here on the Forum in this regard. Panoguy in particular.

All of this breaks down in to about 3 areas. A camera and lens is just the start. Then there is the mechanical support (tripod, heads, etc.) to hold the camera and lens. The last is the software (and a PC to run it on) to take the results and then folds, spindles and mutilates them together in to a final image to your liking.

[RAART]

I also like to shoot and stitch architecture, or downtown at night (blue hour). With this, I do get some strange buildings that due to the projections have the structures leaning in various directions. Kolors perspective control has done wonders in this respect. I also have a shift lens, and the stitching programs need to recognize this and adapt to its output.

I had the same problem with buildings as you mentioned. I did not tested the Kolor product but many others and I decided already that in the spring/summer I must get the software first and one of the manual panoheads and later motorized one as well.

I did not manage to get the picture bellow to my satisfaction but it is quite good for the LR and PS... without panohead.

[ranmar850]

Thank you for all the information: there is a lot to digest there and I will get into it ASAP. I will put more time into that panorama and see if I can improve it. I am rather time poor at the moment-away at work at a remote site, and we work long hours. For comparison, here is another pano I stitched up last night from images taken just after the original one posted. Sun had set, landscape was darkening, and there were some interesting things happening with lights. I realise I have a lot to do with this, but it shows real potential, I think. 11shot, and the pan was roughly level as I was less intent on capturing sky. Very little skew, so the software did it all automatically.



I need to go back and redo the source images in LR--currently my workflow is -- Pick a key scene, PP RAW in LR, apply those Develop settings across all the source images, then export as JPEG. The images towards the right were lighter than the left, so they are a bit over exposed, IMO. I pushed Shadows to 100% to get some detail on the landscape, which brings in noise on the affected areas. I'll go back and tweak it a bit more. Does any know if PS will stitch RAW files?

[RAART]

Yes it does. PS CC will stitch RAW files if I remember correctly but need a lot of processor power and good graphic card... My RAW files are DNG, never tried with PEF. It took a while to finish everything with Quad core CPU and 8GB of ram.

[ranmar850]

I am running a surface pro 3 i5 with 8 meg ram, hopefully would manage it. I import as DNG--it would be great to subtly work the finished pano as a DNG.

[RAART]

Yes, it will save as DNG but also I always save as .psd file as back up and export to jpeg file for web.

[interested_observer]

Just some random thoughts here.

• I see that you are doing the same thing I am, in terms of somewhat overexposing where the sun sets, so that the other side is not so dark. I have been trying to let the dark side just go, and expose for the brighter areas. In post processing you can recover quite a bit of the shadows. The newer (16MP Sony) sensors (K5/K5IIs/K30/K50/K-01) are wonderful at this. This is where I started bracketing, so as to be able to capture as much dynamic range as possible.

• Another thing that I have been finding is that I want to shoot over the foreground in order to capture more sky. I am finding that the foreground tends to get cut off, and that does not help. So going to shorter focal lengths helps in this regard. Also, by opening up the focal length to capture a bit more foreground - you tend to capture additional sky. It's somewhat of a tradeoff in deciding what to do. So, I have been shooting the scene several times with a variety of focal lengths - to preserve the options of choice in post processing.

• The other thing that I do is to NEVER go to JPG (other than to post here at the very end of the processing chain). I always use DNG or TIFF. TIFF preserves all the information (pretty much the equivalent of RAW). In this way, I pull as much information into the actual stitch so that I can post process it a bit more if I need to.

• With a pano head you can take multiple rows, which would free you from having to decide on a focal length in order to maximize the sky and trying to get a reasonable amount of foreground in.

• The more you shoot just using what you currently have, the better feel you will get - and there by really understand how to spend you funds as intelligently as possible.

• I have a 7 year old PC (2GHZ, 8GB) that has worked really well with all of this. It's just out of disk space, and have had some power supply problems. So, over the holidays I just decided to custom build a PC for Lightroom with mirrored storage. But 8GB is sufficient for your stitching. I have stitched up to a 12 panel image taking 1.5GB in TIFF, without any problems.

[ranmar850]

I take your point about the balance of exposure over the long horizontal--I actually cut one image out on the left as it was simply too dark. The exposure was set from what was to be the central image, so it blew out a bit on the right where it was brighter.As I said , this was actually a very rushed job, and I will revisit over the next few days. The software I use will stitch in .tiff, and it actually recommends this for shots with a high dynamic range--I need to look into it more. I didn't realise .tiff preserved the information quite so much.So when I re-import to LR it should reconvert to DNG for more editing power?
The ability to recover the shadows without as much noise would be great, and a K-50 is on my wishlist. I did consider using the HDR capture option of the k-x for this sort of thing, where you have bright sky /dark land. Another thing to investigate. My photography has had a renaissance lately, after falling away in quality and motivation--it was in danger of becoming simply a means of recording, in acceptable quality, my other interests of motorcycles and fishing/boats. Though there is some good subject matter across those two. :-)

[Sagitta]

Don't be afraid to do light retouching on the final stitched image as well. Yea, it'll probably be a jpg or a TIF (TIF's are better for this, obviously), but in the case of that lightening evenly as you go right, then a quick gradient tweak would probably level things off nicely.

Also, don't be afraid to shoot really wide, or really wide open. You won't get the sharpness wide open as you would stopped down, but unless you're planning to keep the stitched pano at 100% you're going to be reducing the image anyway, meaning you're going to be losing detail anyhow. If anything having a slight blur is going to help keep artifacting away from edges in the reduced image. (Don't take this as sharpness being bad, it never, ever is, especially in landscapes, but pano's add another dimension to the mix).

As an example, I like shooting 360's (handheld, using the camera's electronic level as a guide) with my Sigma 10-20 to get pano's. The reason is I use them for shots like this:





The pano that was used to make the latter being this:


One nice thing about photography is (by and large) the rules are made to be broken when the need fits.

FWIW, I tend to use Microsoft ICE for my panos, simply because it stitches very, very well and actually factors in (to a certain degree) distortion and the like and corrects for it.

---------- Post added 01-21-15 at 10:11 PM ----------

Double posting, but gonna explain my usual process, just because I know it differs from the norm.

I use the internal level on my camera. That's it. No tripods unless its late or I'm standing in such a way that turning on my feet would be dangerous.

Shooting this way, I *know* I'll be cropping the ground (usually) out of necessity, but thats OK with me. I also shoot somewhat wide (anywhere from 10mm up to about 35mm or so) because of the whole "going to crop the ground" factor.

Camera settings go on manual - no autofocus, no auto white balance. I meter the scene with the sun just off-frame then lock those settings in. No touchy! I also shoot these shots as in-camera RAW+JPG's, since I use ICE and it doesn't recognize RAW files. I'll go for using the JPGs first, then to the RAWs if the JPGs have issues I need to then fix.

I then make a series of vertical 'portrait' oriented shots (DON'T do landscape! We're going for as much sky and ground as possible here to allow some cropping later). I also shoot the scene twice or even three times, varying the exposure slightly just in case I muffed things.

When I get home, I throw the JPGs into Microsoft ICE, and usually will get what I need with only a minor amount of post work needing to be done. Its fast, somewhat efficient and (for me at least) it works. I've been using this method since before I had a DSLR and was shooting with a cheap Kodak and later budget Powershot. Back then I *did* use a tripod, since I could cock the P&S up into a vertical position. I got nervous with the K-x/K-30 doing that because the camera is so heavy. That in-camera level they have on the K-30 was a lifesaver as I could then ditch the tripod.

At any rate, I've never had many issues. Usually the biggest problem would be if I was shooting with a tripod and not realizing I wasn't perfectly level and the pano would slowly slide up or downhill, resulting in a lot of unwanted cropping where I didn't want it to be.

As an example, I used that method for this monster:



(click through, you'll see its 17537x2240 - shot on an $80 Canon A470). If I could go back in time I'd have done a second series of shots to add some sky, but whatever. Done is done.

The bottom line is you don't need an expensive pano head, or even a tripod to get a decent panorama. Just find a method that works for you, and make sure your camera's settings are locked down so that the focus, exposures, and white balance don't shift. The rest is gravy. I hear people going on about nodal points and $500 pano heads and my eyes tend to glaze over in short order.

Of course this hasn't kept me from lusting after a gigapan head. Like I've said, rules (even personal ones) are always meant to be broken.

[twilight_samurai]

I don't know if the OP has tried shooting two or more rows (shot in portrait orientation) to create a large panorama? The bottom row would mostly contain the portions on the ground with some of the sky; the row above should contain more of the sky but with some of the ground for the overlap; if you're ambitious, you can do a third row that just has the sky portion but I find the software sometimes has issues stitching the sky if there are no clouds to match up. Once you've stitched, you can crop to your desired aspect ratio and composition. Just make sure to be methodical when shooting and to not leave out any sections.

Sometimes if you get mismatches, you just gotta go in there and clone it out.

I prefer shooting my panos with a longer FL, usually an 85mm on my Nikon FF camera, so that there's no wide angle distortion to deal with but of course that depends on the situation.

Handheld 35 image pano created using two rows as described above:


Interestingly, there's a panorama technique popularly known as the Brenizer Method where you shoot with a shallow DOF and long focal length to produce a wide field of view and a shallow DOF look.

21 image pano shot at 85mm @ f/1.4.. I swear this couple was not pasted into the photo lol: