A couple Questions about Panoramic Photography

F

filmguy123

Veteran
I just started messing with this the other day, and a I have a few questions...


1.) Can this only be done when the camera is kept in a fixed position, ie, standing handheld and rotating, or setting on a tripod and then turning the tripod head left and right, or up and down?

... OR...

Can I physically move the camera left/right? For example, let's say I want to take a picture of my entire neighborhood block. Can I set the camera down on a tripod in the street, directly facing a house, and then, instead of rotating the tripod head, leave the tripod head fixed straight forward, but physically pick up the camera/tripod and move 20 feet to the left (keeping the camera facing forward, not rotating the head at all), and then repeating 7-8 times? To create a final stitched image?

Why or why does this work or not?



2.) How is Adobe Photoshop's CS3 auto-align and auto-blend features compare to other software, such as Autopano Pro (http://www.autopano.net/photo-stitching-solutions/autopano-pro/new-ideas.html)



Thanks! I might have some more questions soon :)
 
3.) Another Question: So I went into my living room. Set a tripod in the center with my camera on it. When all the way around, 360 degree circle. Then I tilted the camera upwards, making sure that the bottom half overlapped with the top half of the last series of images I shot. I went around in a 360 degree circle again.

This, I would think, since it was on a tripod and I gave plenty of overlap in all directions, should result in a perfect 360 horizontal and vertical panoramic shot?

Well, I used auto-align on all 40 some layers in photoshop, and then autoblend, and the results were... less than ideal. There were all kinds of errors throughout, like a duplicated lamp blended weird, strange skewings on some stuff, etc.


Is this my fault? Or is this photoshop's fault? Why is this happening?
 
And then, on the same living room shot, when I just choose ONE of my planes, the first horizontal 360 that I did... I *still* get errors... like, I'd think auto-align would align it and the top and bottom edges of all the photos would be level, but it tilts downwards to the right, and when I auto-blend, there are still some minor errors throughout...

was perhaps my tripod not leveled properly? Would this cause it? I'd still think the auto align feature would fix that though...?

Do I have to do some corrections manually? Does photoshop just suck for this? What is wrong!? ahhh!
 
The issue you are likely having with the photos not meshing together is due to the focal length you're taking the picture at. If it's too wide, the distortion makes lines bend and thus Photoshop can't discern one line from the next. Try shooting at a medium focal length of around 40mm (mid-way zoomed in on point and shoots). You'll want to take pictures with about a 20% overlap .

Can you show us an example picture? Even better, put a picture on Flickr so we can view the EXIF data and have more information to base our recommendations on.
 
Ok I think I figured out most of the problems...

One, I think you are likely right about the focal length issue - I've been at full wide.

Also, in Photoshop, I was using "reposition only" - this caused a lot of the problems. I switched to "auto" which chose either perspective or cylinder effect for the alignment, and this solved I'd say about 90% of the issues...

I'm guessing the last 10% has to do with focal length?


I'll post up some of these photos soon...

Until then,

any ideas on #1 and #2?

Thanks SO much!
 
oh - and really, the one with notable problems is "Living Room 360" - that even had some stuff misaligned, by the brown closet door behind the coach, and also the leather chair on the left of the image, most prominetly.


All of these were shot with full wide focal, except for kitchen table, which was shot at full zoom (optical 3x).

I shot these on a Canon Powershot SD400 Digital Elf... YEAH!!! haha :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top