Weird Issue with Panorama

[Vautrin]

Hi,

So I went to Waterloo this weekend, and they have a big hill you can climb atop, and I decided to take a panorama from the top because it was really beautiful. Olympus has a special feature with your camera where you select the panorama option, take pictures, and the software stitches it together for you.

Well this is what it did:

What is with the distortion? Why does it do that?

And anyone know what the best option for printing panoramas is?

Thanks,

Dan

 

[Dubious Drewski]

Did you have to post the full-sized image? It makes reading your post a pain in the neck.

Anyway, this looks like it's caused by the rotation of your camera; perspective will change just like this and the top and bottom edges of the photo will have to be rounded and bent to match up. You can probably reduce this effect if you do the panorama while completely zoomed in. The wider you are, the more the angle of perspective changes.

 

[Buszaj]

Look like the camera "software" doesn't do it to well. If you take a few pictures manual exposure and stitch it in Photoshop, then you shouldn't get distortion or poor stitching. I'm pretty sure its not user error though.

 

[Helen B]

Dubious has it.

Imagine that you are standing in the middle of a circular wall and you took a series of pictures with a wide angle lens to create a rather uninteresting panorama. Say you took six pictures. Every part of the wall is the same distance from you, but in each picture the image of the wall will be lower in the middle than at the edges.

(If the wall was straight, and you took a picture straight on, the image of the wall would be the same height all the way along, even though the 'ends' of the wall are further away from you than the 'middle'. Lenses are designed like that.)

Now, if those images of the circular wall are stitched together you will have a wall that was scalloped. Therefore the stitching software has to expand the centre of each image in comparison to the edges to make the wall the same height. It then starts to get complicated - by errors in levelling and alignment, different amounts of overlap, and lens distortion.

If you take more pictures, by zooming in, as Dubious explains, you will have less of a mismatch at each join.

Best,
Helen

 

[Garbz]

Well really the software is to blame regardless of the optics. It looks like the software tried to correct it and got it horridly wrong. The barrel correction is way off, the alignment is off, the corners aren't blended, and it looks just as you would expect from an in camera feature.

I would suggest have a look at some real panorama tools (No not photoshop's that one is just as crap). A tool like Autopano Pro, or if you're really technically minded the PTAssembler front end for the open source Panorama Tools, and Blender applications. They can make visually perfect panoramas with ease regardless of rotation horridness of individual photos.

Just one note you have a huge sky area there. Finding control points for the correction will be hard for even very good software so I hope you left sufficient overlap.

 

[Bifurcator]

There's pan tools in Blender? Awesome! The app never seises to amaze me!

www.blender.org

 

[Moglex]

To put it as simply as possible: The camera only does an extremely basic job.

A decent stitching program will make many adjustments including things like the geometry of the individual shots and their exposures.

Nothing, however, can give you a straight edged rectangular result (without grotesque distortions).

If you have the original shots download the free Hugin program (It's available here) and see what sort of a job that does. It should be a very considerable improvement on what can be achieved (at the moment) 'in camera'.

 

[JerryPH]

Crappy choice in stitching software. AutoPano Pro rules.

You could improve your results, though, by having the camera set in full manual mode, and NOT changing settings in between shots, having it on a horizontally aligned tripod and shooting in full zoomed mode of whatever lens you have (a 50mm or 105mm prime work very well for this).

A good idea is to take the pictures with the camera in portrait mode (tilted sideways 90 degrees), and take more shots. But if you use AutoPano, you can take several rows of shots and it will arrange the pictures properly without any stitching lines. It works quite impressively.

Edit: Waterloo... USA or Ontario Canada? If in Ontario Canada, where is this place? I will be in Kitchener/Waterloo in October for their Octoberfest. This area looks nice!

 

[Helen B]

Edit: Waterloo... USA or Ontario Canada? If in Ontario Canada, where is this place? I will be in Kitchener/Waterloo in October for their Octoberfest. This area looks nice!

Waterloo in Belgium, where Wellington beat Napoleon.

Best,
Helen

 

[Moglex]

Crappy choice in stitching software. AutoPano Pro rules.

In your opinion. I have obtained excellent results with it and it has the added advantage of being free.

You could improve your results, though, by having the camera set in full manual mode, and NOT changing settings in between shots, having it on a horizontally aligned tripod.

Good advice but Hugin takes care of shots of differing exposure and tilts fully automatically. Of course, the less processing it needs to do the better.

But if you use AutoPano, you can take several rows of shots and it will arrange the pictures properly without any stitching lines.

As can Hugin.

Edit: Waterloo... USA or Ontario Canada?

I believe there is also one in Belgium.

Indeed I believe that is the original.

I assume it's not the one in London because of the absence of a very large railway station.

 

[Vautrin]

Waterloo... USA or Ontario Canada? If in Ontario Canada, where is this place? I will be in Kitchener/Waterloo in October for their Octoberfest. This area looks nice!

Waterloo, Belgium. Napoleon and Wellington fought on the spot where I was standing, and the crown prince of the Netherlands -- WIlliam of Orange -- was shot fatally on that very spot. So they built a big mound there to commemorate it -- 143 ft high -- it's pretty steep, but you can climb to the top and get a panorama of the countryside...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butte_du_Lion

 

[Garbz]

There's pan tools in Blender? Awesome! The app never seises to amaze me!

www.blender.org

No no no. Just happens to be two open source programs by the same name. The blender I am talking about is a small program (that requires a huge amount of ram) and what it does is adjust, crop, combine, and blend panorama frames together, after they have been rotated skewed, and otherwise distorted by PanoramaTools.

 

[Bifurcator]

Oh... I see. Thanks for the clarification. Hehehe but panorama assembly is something that the CG blender guys would probably try and do. Those guys are downright weird. (in a good way of course)

 

[mrodgers]

I'm just glad that I run my monitor resolution at 262144 x 764.... Made seeing the image easy :???:

 

[Vautrin]

You know when I post small compressed pictures people complain that they can't see the detail and when I post full sized pictures people complain there's too much detail....