Step By Step Panorama Stitcher For Mac
0 Comments While visiting an art gallery or a photography exhibition, at times you may have noticed certain landscape photographs have extremely elongated fields of view. They seem quite impossible to have been photographed with a standard camera. If you wonder how such elongated photographs are made, you are not alone. I had my first encounter with a panoramic image of the Himalayan mountain range being displayed at Das Studios in Darjeeling, a Himalayan resort town in West Bengal, India.
That photograph had a huge impact on me and it led me to searching for ways and means to photograph panoramic images. During my initial search I figured panoramas were probably made with highly specialized cameras and lenses. But, to my surprise I found that panoramic photographs can be made with any kind of camera at your disposal. All you need is a camera, preferably one capable of shooting in Manual mode. Yes, with certain cameras and Smartphones you can get Apps for recording a panorama in a sweep but I never found the results quite satisfactory. Shooting your own panorama gives you the creative freedom and a sense of satisfaction. How to shoot a panorama A panorama is a combined set of individual photographs, in which two adjacent photographs have at least 20% overlapping areas.
These two, or more, overlapping photographs are “stitched” with the help of software to produce extremely elongated fields of view. The overlapping is required as the software is able to understand the common areas in two adjacent photographs and hence can eliminate duplication of a scene by stitching the same into a single photograph. Before shooting a panorama, you need to plan out well. Here is a list of guiding factors for creating your own panorama. #1 Shoot in Manual Mode Since a panorama is shot over a large field of view where lighting conditions can be different, it is imperative to with Manual Focus. This will ensure all the photographs shot have an exact exposure value and focus throughout all the images. Shooting in Automatic, Program or Semi-Automatic modes (like Shutter priority or Aperture priority) will result in different exposure values for each photograph, which in turn may cause the final merged photograph to have varied exposure and color casts in different parts of the photograph.
#2 RAW or JPEG While you generally want to shoot in RAW, it is preferable to switch to JPEG for panoramas. Shooting in RAW is absolutely fine, but since the photographs will not be edited individually (we will see this at a later stage) and to reduce shutter lag, shooting in JPEG is preferred. A word of caution – as we will be shooting in JPEG make sure the exposure values are correctly adjusted. #3 Tripod or handheld? If the weight of your tripod is not a factor,.
However on a bright day you can very well rely on your own hands. A steady posture, or using your camera bag or any sturdy object available to rest the camera on, will save you the weight of carrying a tripod. #4 Horizontal or vertical We are generally accustomed to shoot in Landscape (horizontal) mode.
Shooting in Landscape is fine but the resulting panorama will be short in height, since Landscape photographs will be stitched together. Additionally, during the stitching process there will be a lot of redundant or blank areas (you will see later during the post-processing) which need to be cropped out.
This will further reduce the height of the panorama. To overcome this issue you may choose to shoot the panorama in Portrait (Vertical) mode.
This will help in achieving a greater image height which can be cropped out as per requirement, say for printing or aesthetics. #5 Be fast Be very quick in shooting since light conditions change fast. Additionally if you are shooting a cityscape, a populated beach or a scenario where there is movement, be cautious. If you are not shooting fast enough, you will find moving objects (e.g., people, cars, bikes) will be duplicated across the frames. You would not want to see the same object twice across the panorama.
# 6 Plan it out well Stand at the selected spot and plan the number of shots in advance. This will help you in keeping a control of the number of shots rather than shooting randomly.
Be sure to do a mock round without actually shooting. When you are ready, start shooting from left to right. Make sure you have at least 20% overlapping areas in two consecutive photographs. An visual estimate will suffice. Look through your viewfinder and shoot.
Do not look at the individual photographs on your LCD screen until you finish shooting. Before leaving the scene turn on the LCD screen and review the photograph series.
If you are not happy, shoot again. Stitching your panorama The sext step is stitching your panorama. There are plenty of panoramic stitching software available on the internet.
Step By Step For Drawing
I will put a list of links to some of the best software at the end of this article. The stitching process is similar across software but as of now we will use the. The stitching process in Adobe Photoshop is fully automated. Since you may have shot more than one panorama series, for the purpose of identification it would be easier to store each series in a separate folder. You may have shot in JPEG or RAW but make sure you do not edit individual photographs. Steps to stitch a panorama:. Open Photoshop.
Click File Automate Photomerge. “Auto” is the default Layout option.
Photoshop analyzes the source images and applies either a Perspective, Cylindrical, and Spherical layout, depending on which produces a better Photomerge. Choose “Auto” if it is not selected by default. Check “Blend Images Together”. Next Click “Browse” and locate the separate Folder where you have put in your panorama series. Select the series and click “Ok”. Depending on the number and size of the photographs, it may take a while for Adobe Photoshop to stitch together the images. After the stitching process is completed you will find a roughly shaped panorama (with a few redundant spaces).
Refer to the image above. Right click on a Layer in the Layers panel and click Merge Layers. The next step is to use the Crop Tool to trim out the redundant portions of the panorama. After the final touches you are done with your very own first panorama Links to panorama stitching software:. If this is the first time you are creating your panorama, I would love to receive your feedback or to share your panorama in the comments below. I haven’t used other software options mentioned at the end, but between Photoshop, Hugin & Microsoft ICE, I found ICE to hit perfect balance.
Photoshop was the slowest, didn’t offer enough options to tweak the way panorama is stitched and in general nightmare to work with if your workflow is RAW oriented. It took me once 30+ minutes to stitch 35 x 24mp RAW files into photoshop, on a pretty high-end machine. Hugin offered lot of options to tweak and it was a great experience (like a boy getting a new robot as toy) at first, but in regular workflow it can get really overwhelming. Microsoft ICE, is as simple as it comes while still offering decent curve to adjust the way your panorama stitching is handled. It offers enough important options to tweak without overwhelming users and it was the fastest of the bunch in my experience. The same 35 x 24mp RAW files took less than 3 minutes to stitch (and about 14 mins to write the final uncompressed TIFF).
Generally, I do basic processing on the RAW files first in LR, which is sharpening, noise reduction and lens profile correction etc., plus very small color tonic and white balance adjustments. Export as TIFF, stitch them in ICE and export the final as uncompressed TIFF and all final grading back in LR. This ensures maximum quality is retained and I still get enough editing headroom on final file back in LR. It can get bit resource intensive, but really, a small price to pay for maximum quality. I don’t know I think I agree with Martin.
I’d argue that it’s preferable to shoot in RAW if you’re comfortable doing so and suggest that JPEG is a fine alternative if you’re not – not the other way around. I wouldn’t say that it is ever preferable to shoot JPEG over RAW (you could argue for time-lapse situations maybe to allow more frames quicker and on a single card, but even that’s questionable IMO). I do see what you’re trying to do with the suggestion, by making it easier for the beginner photographer, but I just think it’s misleading someone who’s still struggling with the RAW v JPEG question. The rest of the article is, as Martin said, pretty much spot on for getting started with panoramic shots. Thanks for the feedback. Yes, you are right regarding the distortion. However, I guess there would be no best focal length perfectly applicable in all situations.
Step By Step Panorama Stitcher For Mac
If you are photographing a scene – landscape / cityscape which is quite far off from you – a shorter focal length like 18mm works fine with less or no distortion. The closer the scene being photographed, more is the distortion with shorter focal length. Again if the if the scene is closer it would be easier to photograph with a shorter focal length, else if you increase the focal length to avoid distortion, you may need to use a technique called Matrix Panorama. To avoid distortion you may go ahead with 50mm, however this is just a suggestion. From my experience I found even shooting at lower focal lengths like 18mm creates distortion but while you post process using a stitching software mostly it is taken care of, however you may (mostly) need to adjust the horizon tilt.
I hope this somewhat clarifies your query. Thanks for the feedback. Yes, you are right regarding the distortion. However, I guess there would be no best focal length perfectly applicable in all situations. If you are photographing a scene – landscape / cityscape which is quite far off from you – a shorter focal length like 18mm works fine with less or no distortion.
The closer the scene being photographed, more is the distortion with shorter focal length. Again if the if the scene is closer it would be easier to photograph with a shorter focal length, else if you increase the focal length to avoid distortion, you may need to use a technique called Matrix Panorama. To avoid distortion you may go ahead with 50mm, however this is just a suggestion. From my experience I found even shooting at lower focal lengths like 18mm creates distortion but while you post process using a stitching software mostly it is taken care of, however you may (mostly) need to adjust the horizon tilt.
I hope this somewhat clarifies your query. Good overview article, but I might add a few points.
Under Manual Control you stress the need to keep exposure the same, but don’t say how: it is imperative to set your ISO, aperture, shutter, and white balance before stating and do not change at all as you capture the entire panorama. I would also suggest using a small aperture and setting manual focus at the hyperfocal distance so that the image will be mostly in focus, otherwise as you rotate the camera the plane of focus will cut diagonally through different parts of the scene in each shot. Lastly, I would emphasize the importance of keeping the camera level so that perspective does not distort shot to shot. It is also fun to try a vertical panorama by shooting in landscape and tilting the camera from nadir to zenith.
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