How to correctly take panoramas

S

shane1980

Suspended / Banned
Messages
277
Name
Shane dennigan
Edit My Images
No
Hello,


Just curious what's the best method on an slr to take multiple shots for stitching in photoshop, do I put focus in manual what's the best mode to shoot.....
Any help

Thanks
 
Manual focus and manual exposure. The exposure becomes a compromise if the dynamic range is too great.. but it's much easier to get a good result if both the focus and the exposure and constant across the stitch.
 
As above plus a tripod that is secured on the horizon so you can move left to right. Also (for left to right) pick a spot on the right and slide the head to the right so the picket spot on the right is now on the inside left....keep repeating until you have covered the full panoramic
 
Shoot portrait to minimize the bow tie effect.
 
Firstly, forget about photoshop, it's not the right tool to stitch panoramas. Use PTGUi or Hugin or Autopano or any other app based on PanoTools.

Secondly, THE biggest problem with shooting a pano is parallax - i.e. an effect when foreground object is 'moving' against background as you rotate your camera. The only way to avoid that is rotate camera against lens' nodal point, but you need a special tripod head for that. This effect can be minimized by minimizing horizontal field of view - i.e. not using UWA lens or shooting in portrate mode.

Use manual focus.

Manual exposure is not absolutelly neccesary - good stitching tool can equalize it.
 
And for some slightly less advanced advice, don't take too many shots (i.e too wide a view). Not only will you struggle to ever present it in a useful format but the distortion can mean that what you shoot looks completely different to reality. e.g a straight piece of coastline becomes a heavily curved one.

Of course, you may want that effect, in which case ignore the above.

As well as locked focus and exposure (make sure auto iso is switched off), I'd also suggest using a preset white balance rather than auto. Even if you shoot RAW it's less hassle afterwards if you don't have to adjust each shot before stitching.
 
Some good advice already in this thread. My 2p... Photoshop is fine for most panorama stitching, if not quite optimal. Shoot portrait where possible, as mentioned above, and make sure to overlap your images by a decent amount - 30-50% is what I normally aim for. Finally, it's much easier to stitch images taken at longer focal lengths (50mm +). The wider you go, the more distortion you have to correct when stitching.
 
MS ICE is pretty good for the stitching, and it's free. It doesn't handle raw though, so I usually take a sample of shots from the shoot and develop a rough process in LR, apply it to all the images and then export at the highest quality setting ready for stitching. Back into LR afterwards to finesse the post-processing.

With a 30mm on a crop sensor, using manual focus and manual exposure I can get a good daylight panorama hand-held. A tripod makes things a lot easier, include plenty of overlap on shots and always shoot extra space above and below your intended composition.
 
I'm also new to panorama, but I tried Hugin the other day, and got good result. It's simple and also free.
 
gunnar said:
Firstly, forget about photoshop, it's not the right tool to stitch panoramas. Use PTGUi or Hugin or Autopano or any other app based on PanoTools.

Secondly, THE biggest problem with shooting a pano is parallax - i.e. an effect when foreground object is 'moving' against background as you rotate your . The only way to avoid that is rotate camera against lens' nodal point, but you need a special tripod head for that. This effect can be minimized by minimizing horizontal field of view - i.e. not using UWA lens or shooting in portrate mode.

Use manual focus.

Manual exposure is not absolutelly neccesary - good stitching tool can equalize it.
Click to expand...


All of the above is excellent advice. Parallax is by far the biggest issue i've found when shooting pano's. One other way to cut it down is to imagine that the tripod is attached to the end of the lens not on the body and move around that point (nodel point mentioned above).
 
Using a tripod is not always necessary, although it makes it a lot easier. I've shot a few hand held panorama's and had some good results (in my opinion). I use PTGUI as it's a fantastic bit of software.

Here's one I did at Buckingham Palace (no chance of using a tripod here!):

uJjWX.jpg


I shot a 180 degree panorama one evening, I think each shot was a 30 sec exposure. The sun fully set during the panorama (it came to 13 shots in total I believe) which made for an interesting effect.
 
I have found that taking an exposure reading across the image and slightly overexposing the brighter side and under exposing the darker side works well when setting the camera to manual.

I have had some great results with using Photoshop, the only reservation I have is the files can soon get very unmanageable, my computer is not slow and it still struggles.

Finally if using Photoshop then you can use the transform and skew tool to stretch the ends vertically which helps to reduce the curvature. If you are using a high enough sensor size you shouldn't notice the reduction in quality brought on by the stretching.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top