Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/09/08
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]on 9/8/01 6:53 PM, Ted Grant at tedgrant@home.com wrote: >>>>> the Canadian National Exhibition. >> >> http://www.pinkheadedbug.com/360/623-pan-3-crop-flat.jpg <<< > What I'm surprised at is, the quality and consistency of the exposures as > you matched them to look as though the finished photograph was taken with a > Panon or some type of panoramic moving camera. > > How long does it take to assemble the exposures to the final product? the first thing is to shoot the images at the exact same exposure and do it quickly before the light changes. You can get away with exactly ONE ugly discontinuity, but it has to be where the pan breaks. You can cover up an error this way but at the expense of choosing the center point of the final image. you pretty much have to use color neg because the exposure variation between a shot into the sun and a shot with the sun at your back is extreme, and you can't stop down/up to compensate the second thing is to scan them identically with a fixed exposure etc. Vuescan is the easy way to do this, otherwise you scan 'em raw and do exactly the same manipulations to each image then the hard work begins! about 30 mins to set up the control points between the images so the software knows how to match them up about 30 mins to optimize yaw, pitch, roll etc to compensate for camera movement between exposures. This is where you find out how well you shot it. about 90 mins processing time for the software to churn away and remap them to a cylindrical presentation (I do this on a second computer) about 10 mins for an action in Photoshop to build the remapped images into a massive layered file and apply the first (very bad) automated stitches using layer masks. about another 60 mins to do the proper stitches manually, color correct, and produce the final image but it's fun so it doesn't seem like hard work (the hardest thing is choosing the spot to take the pan from... if you don't get THAT right everything else is a waste of time. It's really hard.... trying to find some magic place... there is a greek word for it I think... 'omphalos'... the place of power) sometimes the lens vignetting causes dark bands... to correct these you take the final image into LAB color mode and dodge the lightness channel - -- John Brownlow http://www.pinkheadedbug.com