Digital still panorama shots stiching - help?

[LvR]

So

Been to the coast sipping wine and watching whales doing their thing not 100m from the front portch against the backdrop of lovely sunsets.

Thought I would mount the camera on a tripod and take super-duper panoramas to make friends jealous - yeah right!

Lots of effort has gone into ensuring that the horizontal axis was kept perfectly alligned with the horizon - exposures and overlapping of individual shots also worked well.

Sat down and stiched the 9 individual photos together (Camedia 4 from Olympus) to form the panorama - stiching seems perfect, but

While looking at the panorama, I now find that there is a marked "bulging" to be seen in each of the shots along the horizontal line of the sealevel! . Now I know this is due to the fact that at the time of taking the photos, I was standing about 30M above the horizon in combination with the camera lens charactiristics.

So - is there somebody out there that knows about some panorama stiching tool, that will also enable me to remove the wavey characteristics of the horizon on my panorama due to the deficiencies of the photographers (me) techniques?.

I have tried with Photoshop, but its just too much pain.

[gt40]

hmmm, problem may be related to camera angle/lens focal length (ie the horizon doesn't form a straight line).
Can you retake the pictures looking at the horizon to make sure it looks straight?

[LvR]

Yeah - I agree about the cause as I mentioned.

Retaking pics? - no - I am now 1350Km from the whales sans wine!.

I have also taken other composite panoramas but not as demanding ito a straight line running through all the individual photos to be joined, and those came out "perfect" once the stitching was completed.

Seems like a need a "user definable continuously variable" free transform tool.

[SitFlyer]

You might find the info you want here:

http://www.templetons.com/brad/

This guy has some awesome pictures on his site.

[gt40]

I know adobe premiere can do this to video, there has to be s/w to do this to stills!

(video-transform-camera view)

[Marshmallowman]

If you find some let us know,
I have a few wide angle photos I would like to "correct"

[LvR]

Sitflyer

Thanks for the link, but his very first panorama that I opened contains exactly the same hassle as what I am trying to correct here for and he only has 3 pics in his panorama.

No tools/method found yet.

[efty]

LVR can you post the photo??

Where was it taken?

[Greebe]

I suppose you are using ~50-55mm lens equivalent on a 35mm camera are you?

Reason I mention this the opitcal dilation that occurs when using wide angle lenses and trying to capture as much of the scene as possible per frame. That's a no no and is exactly as you have described.

The 50-55mm focal length lens is roughly the same as the unaided eye.

You can do a bit of touch up by using a flexiable bellows and canter the scene optically either during the actual shot or when printing.


I think there is a dilation filter in Paint Shop Pro that may undo this effect... haven't tried it tho.

[LvR]

Greebe

Yeah - Olympus C2000 with a 3x variable optical zoom - no chance of bellows/other mechanical tools when shooting - due to both the cam design and content of Jack Daniels/wine normally present in blood of operator!

Photoshop7 has all the tools under the "transform" heading to do individual shots, and you can make them look perfect on their own. Once you start correcting each of the indivual shots of a composite panorama, you quickly get stuck with too many other unwanted variables getting introduced that makes the stiching process return utter crap and renders it totally useless.

eftychios

Pic attached - low res, and if you look at the sealevel you will see the 3 or 4 "bulges" that is my current bugbear.

[Maggi]

http://www.panavue.com/products/

http://www.easypano.com/download.htm

http://www.pixtra.com/Downloads/Download.htm

http://www.d-store.com/d-store/Canon/canon_photo_stitch.htm

[LvR]

Thanks for the links Maggi - busy checking out.

[Greebe]

I'd set the zoom to the 50-55° range (whatever your's is equivalent to) and take a few test shots

There are medium format panorama cameras made specifically for this where the backplane is curved... Pricey stuff tho

IMHO all you would need a decient 3.3MP digicam or better, a bit of practice (read: patience) and a decient tripod to pull this off (maybe a few filters... medium density of say 30-40% a linear polarizer, and skylight

send me a short series of photo's via email and I'll have a look see

(sorry no pr0n

[LvR]

The "Pixtra" link that Maggi dug up is the one I need.

The others are not nearly as comprehensive.

With Pixtra you can select existing cam lens characteristics according to make/model for corrections. If a dedicated profile for your camera make and model does not exist, they supply a method of creating one!.

Once you have all your individual shots on the processing line, you tell it to do it. It will use you specific cam profile to apply corrections and come back to allow you to select the observation point, correct for tilt and angle, move specific points on 2 overlapping shots to exactly correspond if you want to, and a horde of other perspective adjustments - man I love technology.!

If you want to, you can also rotate/tilt and align a set of 3 self-chosen points between any 2 photos and force a stitch using that as criteria if you feel that the program does not know what its doing.

I had a nice test-drive using the Olympus C3000 profile as my C2000 profile is not yet defined - and the corrections/effects I am getting is exactly what I was looking for. The program does seem to decide that given certain overlapping characteristics, the operator should not be given the option to correct perspective at all - the result is that 2 of the 5 joints return rather crappy results - I will blame myself and the incorrect cam profile for that for the moment.

Will have to spend a lot more time getting to know the intricacies, but I am sure I will lick this thing once I have created a profile for my particular cam.

Will post resulting improved pic back when I eventually manage it.