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Stitching vertically AND horizontally?

TRSmith

Subscriber Member
After a stop at Mike Johnston's forum the other day, I found myself linked to a "how to" by a NY photographer that uses a technique of shooting people by stitching lots of shots of the same scene together. Unlike a traditional "panorama" that ends up with a narrow, wide image, his resulting images (made up from as many as 30 frames) were more like a traditionally framed shot. The short video explained how he shoots the scene but not how he stitched the final image.

So I decided to give it a try and discovered that the stitching process (whether it's done in PS or PTgui) is anything but straightforward. What's the trick? Anyone ever tried this?

Thanks,
Tim
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
I suspect the most important "trick" if there is one, would be to get all the captures done from the same camera position, as quickly as possible while making sure ISO, WB, exposure and focus are the same. Also, if shooting hand-held panos, the longer the lens the better, and having a fair amount of frame overlap helps a lot too.
 

TRSmith

Subscriber Member
Yes, that's exactly the advice the photographer gave when describing the shooting process. And that's what I did for my test shots. Everything manual and fixed, with an overlap in the frames shooting a grid pattern of shots in rows going left to right and top to bottom. But when I asked the software to stitch the frames, it became lost and ended up with a jumbled image that required a tremendous amount of finicky hand work to bring it even close.

I'll try it again and modify my framing, but so far what I've seen is that the software wants to make a long horizontal and can't grok that there's images that belong above and/or below the central image.
 

jlm

Workshop Member
i've done 3x3 stitches using CS5 photomerge auto mode with no problem, using nine 16 meg tiff images
 

TRSmith

Subscriber Member
I must have screwed up the sequence somehow. Does it seem to make a difference if you go left to right for row #1 and then back to left for row #2 etc.?
 

edmund

New member
Have you tried Autostich? Or Autopano?

It seems to work for both vertical and horizontal photos -- Ive used it on my iPhone and it works pretty well.

Also, have the link to the tutorial?
 

jlm

Workshop Member
i simply opened all nine files in CS5, selected photmerge, auto, use opened files

away it went

a few times, i have had PS fail (large files, and a mystery or two) autopanoGiga was able to do the same files no problemo
 

jlm

Workshop Member
i did try and stitch a nine image horizontal 16 bit pano, from my Hd3-39. choked PS to a standstill, (too large a file size) but autogiggle had no problem.
advantage was a better use of the aspect ratio of the lens, no wide angle effects, and a monster file, putting even the 80meg backs to shame
 

Steen

Senior Subscriber Member
I must have screwed up the sequence somehow. Does it seem to make a difference if you go left to right for row #1 and then back to left for row #2 etc.?

Tim, That's the sequence I always use for panorama captures.
I have just reinstalled PTGui with my old registration key and given it a try and I can confirm that PTGui could easily detect when to go to the next row when making the alignment puzzle.

I think the trick is to decide some appropriate fixed points in the scenery and memorize them carefully and then use them repeatedly for the sufficient overlap both horizontally AND vertically as well.
I have tried to illustrate it, not all that easy but I'm sure you get the point.
The red dots on yellow are the fixed points in the scenery to be memorized and to be reused (re-shot) in the next column and again in the next row as well, while shooting.



 

Steen

Senior Subscriber Member

I made a 5 columns x 2 rows = ten frames all together panorama to test your sequence in PTGui.

It ended up as a frame with:
10,322 x 6,763 pixels
69,8 Mp all together



 

Steen

Senior Subscriber Member

Here's a small websized version of the 5 x 2 panorama, linked to the full size ~ 70 Mp file (11 Mb).


click for larger (warning: 11 Mb)


Nikon D300 • Nikkor AF-S 1.4/85mm G • 1/500 sec. at f/8 ISO 200 • Capture NX • PTGui
 

TRSmith

Subscriber Member
Steen! Thank you my friend. Very nice explanation. I will study it and try it tomorrow. I'll post my test results here. Thanks!
 

Steen

Senior Subscriber Member
I need to add that I actually dare not recommend PTGui.
It is very easy to use, but with larger panoramas in maximum quality it generates large JPG files that cannot be recognized or opened by most of my image converters or editors.

I had a lot of trouble with this one.
It is a 9 columns x 3 rows = 27 frames panorama in maximum quality resulting in a 130 Mb JPG file.
Most of my image editors could not open the file, some of them even could not recognize the file as a true JPG file.
But finally I succeeded to compress the file to a 36 Mb file.

19512 x 7899 pixels = 154 Mp


 

Steen

Senior Subscriber Member
I have uploaded it to zoom.it where you can zoom into uploaded image files with the scroll wheel or the zoom buttons, just click the below picture.
At the bottom to the right on the page there is a Toggle Full Page button.
(And for those who use a pc with Internet Explorer, F11 wil let you browse in a full screen without menu bars, while a new click on F11 will bring the menu bars back again).
Unfortunately you can zoom further than 100 % into the file, which makes the image quality look worse than it actually is.


click for zoomable file


Nikon D300 • Nikkor AF-S 1.4/85mm G • 1/800 sec. at f/8 ISO 200 • Capture NX
 
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