A panorama stitching tutorial "How to avoid parallax errors", Q&A

[AlexanderB]

I just finished a tutorial on how to avoid parallax errors while stitching panoramic images. Hope someone here will find it useful.
Please ask any questions, I will answer in this thread. Enjoy!​

 

[tirediron]

Fine as far as it goes, but wouldn't it be worth mentioning that by far, the most common issue with panorama shooting is failure to rotate the camera on a level plane? Perspective errors due to rotating the lens about the incorrect point are generally only a problem when the subject is very close to the sensor plane. In typical landscape panoramas, where the subject matter is reasonably distant, it's not a big issue.

 

[AlexanderB]

Fine as far as it goes, but wouldn't it be worth mentioning that by far, the most common issue with panorama shooting is failure to rotate the camera on a level plane? Perspective errors due to rotating the lens about the incorrect point are generally only a problem when the subject is very close to the sensor plane. In typical landscape panoramas, where the subject matter is reasonably distant, it's not a big issue.

Do you mean the case when the camera is not strictly aligned with the horizon and in the stitched panorama the horizon becomes curvilinear? Per se the leveling is not a requirement as the horizon can be made into a line in the projection editor + overall rotation needs to be fixed.
For example this image was taken with a heavily tilted camera:

The guy decided to leave the horizon tilted, but that easily fixable with overall rotation (e.g. crop tool in lightroom and similar applications).
Parallax errors unlike the camera tilt are almost not fixable after the fact, so I left this out.

Thanks for suggestion it's a good topic for another tutorial.

 

[tirediron]

Fair enough.