6 replies to this topic

[geek-accountant]

In another podcast (not sure what the etiquette is concerning other podcast, so sorry if I shouldn't mention it), we discussed Andrew Morris's (unrealshots here on the forums) method of taking panorama photos. He puts the camera in rapid fire mode and just fires away while panning the camera. You then bring in the images to Photoshop and let it sort out all the blending. I have never tried this before. Any time I did pano's, I used a tripod and carefully made sure i got overlapped images and tried to keep the camera level as it panned.

So I went out today and gave it a try. I turned the camera to the vertical position so I would get more vertical data started firing away. Then I brought the images home and loaded them into Photoshop. There were 30 images in the pano!!! Took the computer a bit to process and I was glad I accidentally picked up the D2h (4mp) rather than my D2x (12mp+) when I headed out the door. If I had know it was going to be 30 images, I would have switched in JPEG mode also.

Anyway, while not a particularly interesting pano, the method did work. Shooting vertical was a good idea because I did have to crop more than usual due to the hand-holding.

Here is the shot.

[HSS-Dave]

Looks great! Do you have a link to a nice tutorial on that photoshop process? I need to try this with my property. Love the clean look of this shot.

[geek-accountant]

All I did was select all 30 images in Lightroom, right click, chose "Edit In" and then chose "Merge to Panorama in Photoshop". Photoshop does the rest. It does take a while to process and I would recommend taking the photos in jpeg mode (unless you really want high quality and are going to make prints). You also need decent light and a decent shutter speed. My shutter speed was over 1/1000.

Tutorials, yea I have a long list of ones I am working on.

[ikon]

Wonder how this would work for multi-row panos? Does LR/PS even handle multi-row?

[geek-accountant]

Good question. I had a lot of other things running on the PC at the time so it really isn't a good judge, but with the 30 images in the above shot, Photoshop struggled. The shot didn't need 30 images and I could have reduced that if I would have shot differently or only selected the images needed to build the pano. My bet is if you can send the images to Photoshop and it can figure out the placement, then you should be able to do multi row.

I guess now I have something else to try.

[JediTim]

Wonder how this would work for multi-row panos? Does LR/PS even handle multi-row?

If you are talking about multi-row as in tiles where you have pictures not only from side to side and above / below it would work. Just remember...the more photos you add to the pano the longer it will take. You should also try to set the camera to manual and attempt to take at the same exposure.

[ikon]

If you are talking about multi-row as in tiles where you have pictures not only from side to side and above / below it would work. Just remember...the more photos you add to the pano the longer it will take. You should also try to set the camera to manual and attempt to take at the same exposure.

Thanks for the reply; overlapping photos both vertical and horizontal is exactly what I was talking about; good to know PS can do it. I think it could really help avoid having finished shots that are too short top-to-bottom.

As far as exposure is concerned, I always do set the camera to a fixed aperature and shutter speed, to help the software with the blending.