Guide to panoramic photography, By me. For you. With... well, acknowledgement of your existence maybe? Options

[Genisis X]

Here's a copy/paste job from my blog I thought you guys might be interested in. I'm too lazy to do all the links as well so you'll have to visit the site if you want to be able to click on things. :P

From http://cachristie.net/archives/600

The ultimate guide to panoramic photography:


I’ve shot my fair share of panoramas and I find that people seem to be confused and intimidated by the prospect of panoramic photography. It’s really not that hard to be honest, it just needs some basic understanding of the principles of panoramic photography, some specialised software and years of practice.

To get started you’ll need a camera and some software to stitch your images together. Every other tutorial on the Internet will tell you need a tripod as well and while it is useful, it’s not absolutely necessary. I shoot panoramas like this by hand all the time:


CAPTION:Sunset over Kuala Lumpur. Taken freehand and composed of 5 individual exposures.

When shooting panoramas there are a few things to consider. These are as follows:

Composition!

You need to have a clear view in your head of which parts of the scene you are going to draw a rectangle around. Put the camera down and look at what is in front of you. Choose a subject for the photo and then decide where in the frame you want that subject to be. If you don’t know what the rule of thirds is then you should probably look that up now. In the image above the subject is the setting sun and I deliberately placed that to the right of frame. All of the space to the left exists solely to compliment the subject.

After you decide what your subject is then you can start shooting. I generally shoot the subject first and then pan away to one side.

Overlap

For the software to stitch your images together effectively you need each successive image to overlap. Most guides recommend at least a 30 percent overlap. If you have a tripod then a 30 to 40 percent overlap will usually be sufficient. Shooting handheld is a different ballgame. When you shoot handheld the camera will not only be moving left to right but also up and down and side to side. This makes it a lot harder for the software to find overlaps as each image will need to be distorted, rotated and horizontally and vertically adjusted to a far greater degree. When shooting handheld aim for a 60-70 percent overlap. When shooting panoramas more image data is best.

Zoom out

Especially for handheld panoramas, zoom out about 10 percent more than you usually would. When you stitch your images together the software will warp and distort images to create a flat plane. This combined with the vertical shifts between exposures that you will get during handheld photography mean that the top and bottom of the frame will be cropped after stitching. To ensure that you don’t have to cut the top off St Paul’s cathedral make sure you have a reasonable amount of space above and below the subject.

Shoot quickly

To avoid changing light conditions which will invariably destroy your panorama shoot as quickly as possible. Night panoramas will take time due to the long exposure time but during the day you should be able to shoot every exposure for your panorama in about ten seconds. Practice makes perfect.

Exposure

When shooting panoramas expect the level of light to change, sometimes drastically, between each exposure. Before shooting use your camera’s light meter to test the exposure of the left, right and centre of frame. Each image has to be exposed with exactly the same settings so find correct exposure of the extreme dark and the extreme light parts of the scene and then set your camera to a setting between the two. This will ensure correct and continuous exposure across the entire scene.

Focus

Use autofocus to set your focus before you start shooting and then turn it to manual focus and test that the entire scene is in focus before you start shooting. If you leave autofocus on you will have parts of your image that are on a different focal plane than other parts and the software you use to stitch your panorama together will likely get confused resulting in a massive waste of time. Always shoot panoramas with manual focus and make sure you don’t touch the focus ring whilst shooting.

Don’t use polarising filters!

The effects of polarising filters vary depending on the angle of the lens in relation to the angle of the sun. Changing the angle of observation, which you have to do to shoot panoramas, will drastically change the effects of the polarising filter between frames creating a wave effect demonstrated in the image below:


CAPTION:Effects of polarising filters on panoramic photography. Note the dark patch in the centre.

Now you’ve got your images you need to stitch them together. You’ll need software for this. I use Photoshop CS5 but I have tried Hugin, the best freeware panorama stitcher I have seen (although it’s a bit confusing to use at first) and PTGui. But before you get around to stitching your images together you need to consider:

Lens distortion

Mainly for zoom lenses (especially my EF 24-105mm L which has heaps of barrel distortion at each extreme of it’s focal range) you’ll want to correct your images for barrel distortion. This will give the stitching software a much easier time when stitching your images together resulting in a more seamless and better looking output. I use Photoshop for this task (go to File -> Automate -> Lens Correction… and export as Tiff, tick geometric distortion and Auto scale image) but you can also use Lightroom. Click the ‘Develop’ heading in the top right and then near the bottom of the develop settings menu bar on the right you’ll find Lens Corrections. I’m unaware of how to do this as a batch in Lightroom.

Stitching

Pretty simple process. Either with Photoshop (File -> Automate -> Photomerge, check ‘Blend images together’, Uncheck geometric distortion correction as you’ve already done this. It sounds counter-intuitive to do it this way but it’s faster when using RAW files.) or another program. Read the literature of whichever program you’re using and make sure when you crop you don’t crop away any parts of the image. Cropping properly comes later!

You spin me right round baby. AKA rotation

In Photoshop or Lightroom import your stitched panorama with all of its ugly jagged edges still in place. Before you crop it down you need to make any rotational adjustments. Use guides. In Photoshop you can click and drag on the rulers to pull down horizontal and vertical guidelines. Use these to straighten your horizon and/or any vertical elements in the scene. Lightroom users can use the crop overlay tool.

Crop

Now you can crop. Think of the rule of thirds again here. Concentrate on the correct balance of sky and land, where the focal point or subject of the image is in the frame and if there are any cropped elements in frame that will clutter the view like half a tree in the foreground to the right of frame. Play around with crop ratios. Widescreen movies in cinemas generally use an aspect ratio of 2.39:1. Changing the aspect ratio can have dramatic effects on your image.

Noise reduction

Zoom right in and make sure there is no noise. If there is remove this before you start adjusting for colour and contrast. If you don’t then when you sharpen or adjust for contrast the noise will become worse and worse.

Further post processing

Sharpen if necessary, adjust contrast and white balance. Set you white point and black point. Pay attention to the histogram. The graph should be spread as wide as possible without clipping the shadows or highlights.

Finally

If you like this article then help a brother out and share it around on Facebook, Google+, Twitter or whatever. I’d appreciate the attention.

--*--

Comments, thoughts and/or criticisms welcome (but not necessarily agreed with :P)

-X

[strifus]

Omg thanks Gen X. Its like you read my mind with this thread. Thank you again. Great post.

[stadl]

Great article. Thanks for posting that.

Do you have any recommendations on stiching software. At the moment I only have LR3 and PSE8, and when you call PSE8, it always needs to downsample images to 8 bits first - seems like tossing a lot of detail after shooting 14 bit RAW.

In the past, I have done dodgy ones using the Canon photostich software that came with a cheap powershot P&S - but the results were never that great, so I gave up on panoramas for printing. Since I was only doing them for small screen photos, I stopped doing stiches in favour of using a 12mm lens and just cropping unwanted sky - of course you were ending up with a <6MP photo at that time, and couldn't go wider than about 90 degrees.

Obviously there is CS5, but it's rather pricey.

[michael.jenkin]

Awesome post ! Love it !

[MandoTiM]

Great article. Thanks for posting that.

Do you have any recommendations on stiching software. At the moment I only have LR3 and PSE8, and when you call PSE8, it always needs to downsample images to 8 bits first - seems like tossing a lot of detail after shooting 14 bit RAW.

In the past, I have done dodgy ones using the Canon photostich software that came with a cheap powershot P&S - but the results were never that great, so I gave up on panoramas for printing. Since I was only doing them for small screen photos, I stopped doing stiches in favour of using a 12mm lens and just cropping unwanted sky - of course you were ending up with a <6MP photo at that time, and couldn't go wider than about 90 degrees.

Obviously there is CS5, but it's rather pricey.

use CS4 & 5 and something called Panorama Factory but there are others. I find CS produces great results without much hassle on most shots, but not all, but that PF is a little fiddly but does give very good control over the final image.

[Genisis X]

Great article. Thanks for posting that.

Do you have any recommendations on stiching software. At the moment I only have LR3 and PSE8, and when you call PSE8, it always needs to downsample images to 8 bits first - seems like tossing a lot of detail after shooting 14 bit RAW.

In the past, I have done dodgy ones using the Canon photostich software that came with a cheap powershot P&S - but the results were never that great, so I gave up on panoramas for printing. Since I was only doing them for small screen photos, I stopped doing stiches in favour of using a 12mm lens and just cropping unwanted sky - of course you were ending up with a <6MP photo at that time, and couldn't go wider than about 90 degrees.

Obviously there is CS5, but it's rather pricey.

Hugin is one of the better free ones available, but the documentation is shithouse. Download it and give it a go and if you have any questions about using it give me a message and I'll write up a how to for it. I've got tons of time on my hands now cause I broke my toe last night ;)

Photoshop is, unfortunately, by far the best option but hugin does alright.

-X

[Antraman]

I use PTGUI, which is simple but powerful program. It gives you plenty of options for various projectons and novel formats, like spheres and inside of cylinders.

[Genisis X]

I use PTGUI, which is simple but powerful program. It gives you plenty of options for various projectons and novel formats, like spheres and inside of cylinders.

Oh yea! +1 to that. I've used PTGui and it's quite good.

-X

[michael.jenkin]

Great article. Thanks for posting that.

Do you have any recommendations on stiching software. At the moment I only have LR3 and PSE8, and when you call PSE8, it always needs to downsample images to 8 bits first - seems like tossing a lot of detail after shooting 14 bit RAW.

In the past, I have done dodgy ones using the Canon photostich software that came with a cheap powershot P&S - but the results were never that great, so I gave up on panoramas for printing. Since I was only doing them for small screen photos, I stopped doing stiches in favour of using a 12mm lens and just cropping unwanted sky - of course you were ending up with a <6MP photo at that time, and couldn't go wider than about 90 degrees.

Obviously there is CS5, but it's rather pricey.

Hugin is one of the better free ones available, but the documentation is shithouse. Download it and give it a go and if you have any questions about using it give me a message and I'll write up a how to for it. I've got tons of time on my hands now cause I broke my toe last night ;)

Photoshop is, unfortunately, by far the best option but hugin does alright.

-X

I have to say, I am loving Hugin, it works well !

[Genisis X]

I have to say, I am loving Hugin, it works well !

Good to know! You can't beat the price of it, that's for sure ;)

-X

[michael.jenkin]

I have to say, I am loving Hugin, it works well !

Good to know! You can't beat the price of it, that's for sure ;)

-X

Yes, and it struggles with 30 overlapped 20 mp photos :)
(I was seeing how far I could push it and I am very impressed)

[Genisis X]

I have to say, I am loving Hugin, it works well !

Good to know! You can't beat the price of it, that's for sure ;)

-X

Yes, and it struggles with 30 overlapped 20 mp photos :)
(I was seeing how far I could push it and I am very impressed)

Was that vertical overlap as well as horizontal, or just horizontal?

-X

[michael.jenkin]

I have to say, I am loving Hugin, it works well !

Good to know! You can't beat the price of it, that's for sure ;)

-X

Yes, and it struggles with 30 overlapped 20 mp photos :)
(I was seeing how far I could push it and I am very impressed)

Was that vertical overlap as well as horizontal, or just horizontal?

-X

Just horizontal. I was seeing how far I could push it :)

[Antraman]

A tip which might be worth adding in the shooting section...

Before and after a set of shots which I intend to be stitched later on, I put the lens. ap on and take a black blank shot...so the shots in between I can readily identify as the ones to be used in a stitch up.

It is a real pain to record image numbers which you need to refer to later on in post-proc. When you import all your shots for the day into your post-proc software, it is easy to see which shots are for the stitch as they are marked by the 2 black frames. And with digital you are not wasting any film with blank shots...

[michael.jenkin]

A tip which might be worth adding in the shooting section...

Before and after a set of shots which I intend to be stitched later on, I put the lens. ap on and take a black blank shot...so the shots in between I can readily identify as the ones to be used in a stitch up.

It is a real pain to record image numbers which you need to refer to later on in post-proc. When you import all your shots for the day into your post-proc software, it is easy to see which shots are for the stitch as they are marked by the 2 black frames. And with digital you are not wasting any film with blank shots...

Very cool and simple idea !!

Thanks

[Genisis X]

A tip which might be worth adding in the shooting section...

Before and after a set of shots which I intend to be stitched later on, I put the lens. ap on and take a black blank shot...so the shots in between I can readily identify as the ones to be used in a stitch up.

It is a real pain to record image numbers which you need to refer to later on in post-proc. When you import all your shots for the day into your post-proc software, it is easy to see which shots are for the stitch as they are marked by the 2 black frames. And with digital you are not wasting any film with blank shots...

Yea I know a few people who do that. I don't do it myself, mainly due to forgetfulness but I'll add it in there. ;)

-X

[michael.jenkin]

Posting my first 45 image Panoramic http://t.co/8B3fZwvu

Picture of the shacks at Pt Parham in South Australia, taken from the waterline.

Not a great one (Overcast day etc) but my first big panoramic. I have not put a thumbnail here as it will look like a thin black line :)