I appear to be doing panoramics again, but digitally. The last few days I’ve been prepping files for a client, and I casually shot some pans during the assignment. They ended up using them.
There’s a host of tools and information and arcana on the web on how to stitch images together for pans. Really Right Stuff makes a pan base for doing it right—you can set your camera at the right nodal point so that there’s no parallax, and it’s self-leveling. It’s really a neat device. I rarely use it.
Fot stitching I started with Helmut Dersch’s Panoramic Tools and PT Stitcher. This free, open source software has a cult following in the panoramic world, for good reason. It’s really good. However, you need to have completed a 4 year advanced degree program at an engineering school to understand any of it. I haven’t, and I don’t. However, there’s a front end shareware program, PTGUI, that does a good job of making these tools accessible to wannabe geeks like me.
PTGui has an easy to understand interface to organizing the images for a pan stitch, it calculates all the control points automatically (with manual override possibilities that I’ve never touched, cause it looks way too hard), and a fantastic output. You can get 16 bit layered photoshop files at the end of the process.
Using this tool, I’ve gotten distressingly casual about shooting my pans. On top is an image I shot in my parent’s United Methodist church in Chambersburg, PA on my last visit. It’s handheld. I scanned the room in two passes, level and up toward the ceiling. PTGui knew which was which, and combined everything with no intervention. I didn’t even set the exposure on manual, I just got it close in ACR and let PTGui make all the corrections.
For the Beit Midrash shot at Yeshiva University, I was on a tripod, but not on the pan base. This required some attention to masking various pan components to correct for the parallax issues that PTGui couldn’t. I had a layered PSD file to work with, so it was just a matter of unmasking the pieces of particular images till it looked normal.
The look with stitching, at wide angles at least, is akin to a turret lens style panoramic, like a Widelux or Noblex. There is no single vanishing point. This technique will not replace my work with the Xpan, but it’s another tool in the box.
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