Panoramas

[musicaleCA]

Okay, here's the situation. I'm trying to merge a few shots I took on the way back from Vancouver Island, at sunset. Got some fantastic colours in the sky. Unfortunately, no matter how many ways I try it, PS CS4 is getting tricked-up somehow and can't merge it properly. I've had it even just give-up and make a canvas 4 times wide as a photo and put all of them in on top of each other on the left side, with no transformation or merging of any kind really.

I think the problem might be that there's very little local contrast in the image. Has anyone used a program that might be able to tackle this situation? (Mac programs much preferred. I don't want to have to deal with the nightmare of merging a pano in a Windows virtual machine. >.< )

 

[musicaleCA]

Annnd, I just found and tried Calico. It didn't work either. Bloody hell...

 

[WTF?]

you could just do it manually, put them into the one document and move them around and adjust them until theyre in the right place.
that seems to be the obvious solution

 

[JamieR]

When you say it doesn't do it properly, do you mean its not aligned properly?

 

[musicaleCA]

More or less. Calico just gave up and said it couldn't align the images, and PS either didn't align them at all, or aligned two and for some reason put the other images way out of place (the images should be aligned horizontally, but some of the images got places way way below the other two... ).

 

[JamieR]

The best thing to, make sure you have them as layers, and make sure they are in order, so the left most image is at the bottom.

Then go select all layers, go to Edit > Auto align layers, select auto, and check geometric distortion, click OK.

Then go to edit > auto blend layers, check panorama.

it should work then.

 

[manaheim]

I find CS3 does it flawlessly... any chance you can put up the images some where so I can take a crack at it? I'm curious.

 

[musicaleCA]

Hrm, okay, I'm going to take another crack at this with Jamie's advice. If that doesn't work, I'll put them up someplace you guys can see them.

 

[musicaleCA]

Okay, using Jamie's advice to help me, I did manage to whip Photoshop into doing what I wanted. Along the way, I did get a more helpful error message, that images should overlap by 40% for auto-align to work. D'oh! That's what I get for shooting so quickly. Damn ferry...

Anyway, after aligning and merging the layers in pairs, and then flattening the pairs, and manually aligning the last two layers (with judicious use of the transform tool), and then some blending, and some more (over-zealous) use of the tranform tool to lessen the distortion, here's what I got:

Now I just have to do the same thing from the top, but this time with the original files. Or at least TIFFs. (I know this one's pretty nastily distorted because of the transform tool still, but I'll pay more attention to that when I complete the image with the original files.)

 

[Garbz]

Images don't need to overlap quite that much assuming they have any detail on the edges. Those pictures you took would be a nightmare for auto panoramas. Take a look at the right most image. There isn't a single point and I mean "point" something with enough detail that it forms an anchor point, above about the bottom 1/4 of the frame. It's not just contrast. It's detail. Skys with no detail have no anchor points leading to software not knowing how to align the images.

You got lucky this time, but generally be prepared to have to manually align the occasional panorama if you like taking views like this, and just going by the look of the distortion in the image I don't think it's aligned properly regardless.

 

[musicaleCA]

Indeed, it's not aligned properly. It's going to take a bit of serious finagling to get it spot on. The point is that I did manage to finagle CS to do my bidding, if reluctantly.

I'll just see how my other panos taken in the same situation pan-out (frankly the worst part was the water that kept getting on my lens...grrr...).

 

[Jeff Colburn]

I had a similar problem with a picture that had blue sky and dark branches. It never lined up the branches properly. What I did was erase the branches in one of the photos, where it overlapped, and it worked fine with no alignment problem.

Have Fun,
Jeff

 

[manaheim]

Yeah I usually overlap about 20-30% of the image, but then I'm usually taking skylines so there are lots of details for PS to pickup on. Glad you got closer, though!

 

[JerryPH]

AutoPano Pro. King of panorama apps... reads Nikon RAW files too, which surprised me. It is excellent at what it does.

 

[musicaleCA]

Ah, but the underlying software is the same. It's called AutoStitch, and was created at my current university, UBC. (Why in the world they didn't release it under a GNU license is beyond me. My tuition fees are paying for this, after all.)