The GetDPI Photography Forum

Great to see you here. Join our insightful photographic forum today and start tapping into a huge wealth of photographic knowledge. Completing our simple registration process will allow you to gain access to exclusive content, add your own topics and posts, share your work and connect with other members through your own private inbox! And don’t forget to say hi!

Stupid question on panoramas in Photoshop

So, I'm playing with panoramas. I've had decent success using Fuji's built in panorama mode, but I'd like more control. Nice swivel base acquired, decent tripod used, nodal point on my lenses found, and so on.

Technically there are some issues here (like not shooting in manual mode, or fixing focus at one distance, or even stopping down). The goal was to check the process though, and I think the images are good for that. I'd shoot another set, but the mosquitoes are out and I'm feeing whiny. Anyway...

Here's the first run using Photoshop CS5's defaults, according to 3 different sets of instructions I'm finding online:



I can crop it and go, but it looks like I'm leaving a lot of image behind when I do so.

If I choose the option to correct for distortion instead, I get this image:



Looks better to me, and the perspective seems more like what I see walking out my back door than the first one.

So, finally, my question: why don't the tutorials I'm finding check the option to correct distortion? It appears from (very) limited testing that doing so produces much better results, so why isn't that the standard recommendation?

Maybe because most perspective distortion is handled automatically, but the X-Pro lens line isn't in Adobe's lens correction database yet?

Finally, I doubt it matters much but these were shot using the 60/2.4, which appears pretty well corrected for distortion, at least at macro ranges. Of course, focus is all over the place which might have contributed a bit.
 

jlm

Workshop Member
my guess is that the un-corrected pano shows a closer to 1:1 pixels shot to pixels shown, whereas the "corrected" version does some interpolation and invents new data, similar to keystone correction in PS compared to keystone correction by tilts and swings as shot
 
Top