Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Panorama Overload

Three Siters from Echo Point at 18mmThe wide vista here in the Blue mountains are much wider than my widest lens (18mm on crop sensor). Which has never been a serious problem as I just take an overlapping photos and then stitch them later.
This is all well and good until you spend most of the day taking overlapping Images. Then you automatically have a lot of homework and after a decent day working tracks and climbing stairs, its not surprising I fell asleep a few times waiting for the big stitches to be finished, The one below is made from 22 images (hand held) and generated a massive 16,040 By 7,381 pixelsEcho Point PanoramaThis is not the only issue if you have a long stream of similar photos on your film strip or _IGP4307thumbnail grid. It might be difficult to find the start and finish of any series. A neat way to figure out where sequences begin and end is to use photographic punctuation, take a picture of your hand (with fingers out – “take five”) or some close up such as rock texture or flower. These are easy to pick up and it is easier to isolate a set of photos to be stitched. pano15-Edit copyAnother organizational assistance can be gained by using the colour patches to help identity those photos that are part of a sequence versus single images. I use Green to flag potential overlapping images (to be stitched in a panorama) and Yellow to flag bracketed sets which I may late choose to process via HDR. I used to always put images to be stitched in a separate lightroom collection, but with lightroom used less and problems transferring collections I have switched over to using the metadata tag ~AS (for Autostitch).Hargreave's Lookout PanoramaA final tool to help keep your photostream (film strip or thumbnail grid) neat is to use stacking. This is a feature that lets group together similar images and just show one typical image (the analogy is you have collapsed the photos into a stack of images one top of the another. Stacking has wider application to avoid clutter in your photos but is an ideal way to group images to be stitched and just display one photo. You can click on the top of the stack to expand it into the included photos. At the moment I only know of Lightroom and AfterShot Pro offering stacking. Lightroom can even be set up to automatically to stack photos that are taken less than a certain time apart
Leaura Cascades Panorama

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