Panoramic Photography

Composite panoramic pictures made up of several individual images can be very useful to show cloud formations. I’ve previously used PTGui to generate panoramas, but now I found Autostitch, which not only works automatically (how do they do that 8O) , but is also free for non-commercial use :smiley:

Here’s a quick and dirty example I created with Autostitch, unfortunately the clouds are very uninteresting.

Stunning views though…

I’ll have to try autostitch, currently use The Panorama Factory but it is not free…

Stuart

Great pix. I can not wait ti try it out on some cloud pix. Thank for the info.
Chuck

Might work really well on my Grand Canyon trip in September.

The challenge with taking pictures there is to resist the urge to shoot everything wide angle to try to give some idea of size.

I did exactly that at the GC back in the film era, and all it did was flatten out the whole landscape, the pictures had no impression of size or depth. At least with digital you can see what’s going on and change your strategy.

For a good panorama (which the linked one isn’t) don’t use a wide angle, use the camera in portrait orientation (increase the height vs. width of the end result), take lots of pics to make up the whole scene. The linked one was a quickie using wide angle, minimum overlap, only 7 or 8 pics for 360 degrees, and you can see the falloff in brightness at the edge of the frames when you put then together.

Thanks, Niko. I’ll keep that in mind.

Fun doing the Panoramic stuff I use Photoshop PS2 it also has the autostitch But beware some of the photos can get large
I’ve seen a few get on the order of 639mb in size!! #-o #-o

That is normally only a problem if you don’t reduce the resolution of the high megpix images first.

Few need a stitched image at X megpix resolution.

I’ve also been using Autostitch. Here is a 4-photo example taken from my front porch, next to the weather cam, before and after cropping.

Niko, your pano is absolutely beautiful!

Here is a panorama I made with autostitch from some pictures I took in the Grand Canyon a few weeks ago.

Not the greatest…

By the way, anyone know of a software polarizer filter?

One of the nice things about autostitch (aside from being free) is that you can just set the desired size of the panorama and not have to mess with the raw images.

Very nice picture…

Same pic with a border and a straight edge.

http://www.tnet.com/POSTED/grand-canyon01.jpg

You sure have a lot of deer 8O

It’s been so smoky here in CA this summer it has been a total bust for photography, and me with a new camera too :frowning:

Niko, thanks for the great tip.
I always used Photovista Panorama, but not all my pano’s went well with that.
Since I use Autostitch, even the worst photographed pano’s are looking great :smiley:
See the example of the lake with windmill. Photographed out of the hand, no tripod:


Nice one Peter!

[color=blue][i]Personally I use Adobe Photoshop to do my Panoramas, but it is expensive. Photoshop Elements is a not as feature packed as Photoshop CS2, but does wonders with pictures for about $80.

I took multiple shots of Casper, WY from our events center last spring, and it turned out good…but had a problem, make sure your shutter speed is the same otherwise they’ll take allot of enhancing

Go [b][i][u]here[/u] for a sample of what I have done using Photoshop.

Have never tried Autostitch.[/i][/color]

http://www.ptgui.com/ is currently the best stitching software out there and its cheap :slight_smile: I’ve used it for the 100+ examples on my blog at http://www.digitalurban.blogspot.com

For weather panoramas High Dynamic Range is interesting as it picks out the clouds well…

Andy

Andy, you have some excellent pictures on that blog. Thanks for sharing!

–Dave

I’ve used both ptgui and autostitch, I would say the results are very similar, but the automation of autostitch is quite amazing.