How do you do panaromas?????

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Hi

After being inspired by Edingburgh Garys panaroma i would love to know how you do them, i have tried several times and they never seem to join, and i always get light patches when they are stiched going diagonally across the photo,

do you need a tripod and panaroma head?

or how else can you do it?

thanks

Mark
 
Buy this months 'Digital Camera' magazine. It explains how to do them and has a few good videos on how to edit and stich them together.

You don't need a panorama head and you can shoot them hand held. But a tripod makes the image even all the way through.
Also, every setting on the camera has to be manual. If anything is auto then the picture will change between each photo, so when you stich them together there will be a visable line.

There are a few dedicated stiching software packages, but from what ive looked at, Photoshop CS3 and Photoshop Elements look like the best options. It can be done in CS2, but its not as easy.
 
Magnum said:
Also, every setting on the camera has to be manual. If anything is auto then the picture will change between each photo, so when you stich them together there will be a visable line.
Click to expand...

Ah - I hadn't realised that, makes sense when you think about it :cuckoo:.

Cheers,

Neil
 
thanks for your help, any other tips
 
also whats the thing about nodal point
 
If you're using a wide angle lens, shoot in a vertical orientation to avoid a fisheye effect and overlap your pictures a lot.
 
Yeh overlap by a third. If you are using a P&S they sometimes have a 'stitch assist' mode. Use that to start with to get a feel how to do it. If not make sure you use lock the exposure before shooting the series of overlapping shots.

Autostitch is a really nice and easy piece of software that automatically stitches jpegs.
 
visualisetheworld said:
also whats the thing about nodal point
Click to expand...
The nodal point is a point, somewhere inside the lens, about which you have to rotate it if you want to avoid parallax error. It's not marked and there's no easy way to calculate where it is: I think finding it is mostly trial-and-error but there may be some clever tricks.

However, you might not need to worry about it. If you're shooting landscape-type panoramas, parallax isn't an issue so don't worry about it. It's only really relevant if you're shooting panoramas in tight spaces (e.g. the interior of a car) and/or where there are objects close to the camera as well as dar away.
 
See http://www.johnhpanos.com/ here under 'tutorials' - this man is a Genius, and possibly a minor deity.

I am trying - very slowly, to get up to speed on spherical VRs, my latest attempt is http://SPAM/5zx7xm ; to get the full quality you need to download the DevalVR viewer first : http://www.devalvr.com/ although it should also open with Quicktime or Flash - depends on your platform and what you can install.

Click on the menu (bottom left) and select the full screen icon, then use the mouse to scroll left,right,up, down and the scroll wheel to zoom in and out.
 
thanks for all the sites and tips, will have a proper look later
 
Two big tips: first, expose for the brightest part of your image, dial that exposure in on manual. Then, focus where you want to focus, then switch to manual focus so that doesn't change.

That should keep everything consistent and make it much easier to stitch--although programs these days can exposure blend pretty intelligently, so inconsistencies aren't too bad.
 
I just found out today that it can be done pretty well in CS2. I didn't have a tripod and i shot some panos handheld. Most parts came out fine, but any slight rotation can cause parts of the image to blur.
It's really fun! Give it a go hand held and use Photomerge in CS2.
 
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