Oh, I suppose you’ll find just about anything that doesn’t fit in the more formal categories in this section. If I’m in the mood to rant about something, or maybe there’s a bit of news I want to share. Some of the videos that aren’t about photography per se are here.
I happen to have and use the Canon 4ti. The other day a friend called up to ask for advise about a camera called the Canon 5ti. I went over to B&H Photo site and looked them both up, and at first, other than the slightly higher price for the 5Ti I couldn’t see any difference.
Same size files, same processor, same size… At first glance everything seemed to be the same. So I brought up both spec sheets (seen below).
Anyone notice what the big change is?
Autopan Giga (Kolor) turns out to be my favorite stitching program by far! The only issue I’m having now is that if my files get too big, NIK Color Effex can’t deal with them. This version of Poets Walk was created by doing it as 180 degree horizontal and removing the other 180 degrees that were originally shot. It’s a better composition with more fun stuff to see. The first 180 degree version was 75 inches long (without interpolation); 8-bit tiff without compression.
Every time I tried to process it in NIK Color Effex, either NIK crashed – or just gave me a nice black tif.
I brought the size down to 50 inches, put it back into NIK Color Effex and the processing (just graduated filters on top and bottom) and the processing was fine. You’re seeing the result of that 50 inch long file brought down to 1400 pixels at 72 ppi for the web.
Here it is.
The workflow for putting these panos together is now very straightforward. I try to shoot them in the same order that the grid is going to be made up with (though I’m not sure yet if that’s necessary). And you go through the five steps in Autopan Giga – and you get to make templates to use for other similar projects, and then last step is rendering and saving.
After quickly rendering three more projects with Autopano Giga – where everything worked the way I thought it should work – and without having to delve into any tutorials – I bought the software last night.
Now I can talk about the workflow a little bit. But before I get to that, I want to show a few more images here in the secret blog. One thing – btw- that was funny – was buying APG because it was the first time that I bought a French piece of software, and the site was written in French. Yes, you could hit the translate button, but still there were funny things such as when you can’t find your country in the drop down box because its Etats-Unis and you’re looking for United States, or America.
And the prices are in Euros.
But besides all that – process went smoothly. You download the trial version, and you get about two weeks to experiment. APG was one of eight stitching programs that I tried. I know there are people in love with PTGui – but that software is a little too mathematical for me. I want to deal more visually with the image and not have to think too much about the Yaw and Pitch just to get an initial stitched print.
With Autopano Giga – it goes like this. Take your raw files, and write an export program in Lightroom (that’s what I use) so that the raw files are transformed to Tiffs (or some sort of more generic format) with a file title that’s going to put them into a useful order. If possible – when shooting – it’s really good if you can shoot in the same order as your grid will be. In other words, you might start on the lowest row and do your columns, then go up one row when shooting, same amount of columns etc etc. This way when you export to the tiff files prior to processing you know you’ll make it pretty easy for whatever stitching program you’re using to get a fair crack and putting the rows / columns together.
And there are good stitching programs (few bells and whistles) like Hugin that are free and which other programs like PTGui seem to be based on.
Anyway. You’ve created your rows / columns of tiff images. Read them into APG (or whatever program you’re using) and in APG you hit detect. The workflow for all these programs – essentially the same. Here are the images. I’m telling you (hopefully) that there are in rows and columns – now go ahead and see if you can figure out how they go together.
APG and PTGui (among others) will give you a number after this, with 5 being the best – saying what it thinks of your shooting. Are these things going to be easy, hard or impossible to fit together.
And then there’s a render step. You decide what size and a few other things about the final output. You might be making a tour file where you get to take a virtual stroll through the 360 sphere. I think that with APG that’s a separate add-on. However – I don’t care much for that stuff (at least right now). But the real thing is how long does it take to process say a 1000 files! Or 100 files (which is now more common for me).
So that’s the basic workflow.
Now there’s a second level of workflow – that has to do with moving people – masking – painting out things – removing some part of an image – and if you want to use the program for contrast // saturation and all the stuff you now use another program for — then you can go for that as well.
Okay… let me go back and see if the set of 76 files I put into APG have finished rendering.
The main thing though – the reason that I ended up with APG 1) excellent and simple interface and 2) it did a heck of a job of stitching a complicated pano that all the other programs had issues with. In short, APG could make decisions without having to ask you about every little thing. It knows that in general, you don’t want overlapping figures.
31,000 pixels long (without any tweaking)
I had a lot of trouble getting my 96 files to stitch together properly in PTGui. So I set out to look at other photo stitching programs. The main problem with PTGui – just the interface. It just seems like there’s so much you need to know in terms of math, or masking etc. and I couldn’t seem to get anything right on a large scale. I played with a few other programs, and then came across Autopano Giga 3.0
No instructions were needed. I was easily able to make a grid (4 rows by 24 columns) and without reading any instructions I knocked out the first giga pano where everything fit together. This shot is from the trial version – so it still has watermarks – and projects can’t be saved.
I want to try two more projects with it – but if it continues to work as easily as it did with this pretty complex one — then I’ll pay for it and move on from there.
In case you’re curious as to print size – I didn’t want to waste space on a demo doing it at the full size – but we’re now in the 20 foot length range @240 dpi. And if I do it at 16-bit – let’s just say it’s a freakin’ huge file. I have three more setups to experiment with. One from this morning – sunrise on the East River. If that comes out — that would be fantastic. I’ve spent a heck of a lot of time into learning this stuff – and I hope it has some sort of payoff. This particular shot, is 360 degrees around the horizontal. You are looking north, east, south, and west.
Well, I finally made the jump from pure technique to something artistic. It was cold, and as usual I forgot to bring gloves. But I got to Poets Walk, and I had the idea in my head last night of where I was going to place the camera so that there would be four roads – sort of a cross in each compass direction. In other words, about halfway down the walk, where there are two roads off to the right and left. Also I decided to do a lot of overlapping because I didn’t feel like coming back to the house and finding that I was missing some piece (as happened yesterday).
So I was sort of cursing the cold, and my hands were starting to stick to the metal tripod. They were getting raw – but I had come this far, and there was no way I wasn’t going to do this thing.
I took 24 shots x 4 rows at 15 degrees each. That is a heck of a lot of data to stitch together. I’m loading the files into PTGui now. To the eye – they look reasonable, i.e. I don’t believe I missed anything. Lighting is an issue as parts were shot almost straight into the sky, and other parts down at the ground. The instructions from most pano groups is to set the exposure and pretty much leave it there, but I decided to let the camera auto-expose each shot. I also went against the book and let the camera focus on what seemed reasonable. It was AV at F8. There were lots of people and I spent a lot of time waiting for people to at least stand clear of the camera, i.e. not get within 40 feet or so.
Then the stupid park police came by, and sat in their scooter, right in my shot. So again I waited and waited. Maybe ten minutes and finally they pulled away.
Then a tour group came by, and pretty much surrounded me – watching – as if I was going to do something with them in every portion of the pano. That would be okay if they wanted to stand still, but no they were just curious about my rig. Eventually they got bored and continued on.
So that was one setup. It probably took me about a half hour or so to shoot. I was happy to easily level the camera (sometimes a real pain for me) with the bubble that the nodal ninja has.
After that, I did one more setup in the plaza by the amphitheater (if that’s how you spell it?). This was even more of a pain as people were swirling all over the place. Of course next time if there’s anything interesting in either of these shots, I’ll get out there early when it’s empty.
Having moving people in some shots isn’t the worst thing in the world – as PTGui allows you to erase parts of an image so that the image below it shows through – but if you have to do a lot of this – you don’t want to with a super large giga image.
Also, I went against what the rules were for using the 20mm with a cropped lens. The instructions I found said you could get by (barely) with 10 images for the horizontal 360. I’ve found this not to be true if the camera was in portrait position. So as I say – I decided to really do a lot of overlapping, as I say and went with 24 images per row.
PTGui also has a grid tool, which is what I plan to use. One thing I learned that makes things easier, is to shoot each row in order. In other words, start with your zero (first) image in the row, and just go around the notched rotation until you arrive back at zero (and don’t shoot that one again – as it makes life confusing). Also, it’s really helpful to shoot your hand between rows, so you know where one starts and one ends in Lightroom.
Oh – you want to see the picture. Sorry… I’ve just finished loading it into PTGui. Will press a few buttons, keep my fingers crossed, and see if I got it right. Stay tuned.
* * *
I got a bunch of things wrong in the stitching process. But I’m certain that I have all the files I need. On top of that – NIK ColorEffx refused to process the file saying it was too large; so I took it from 16 bit to 8 bit. This time it loaded, but after about 10 minutes of processing (ProContrast) ColorEffex crashed.
So for one thing I can see that I’ve got to do the stitching again. But also I need to work at a smaller size, at least for now, so that I can make changes and get it right before going into NIK – if I can use NIK at all on such large files. The file I was working on (or trying to work on) was 1.5 Gigabytes. As I say — stay tuned… :)
Sorry, but I know all these pano tests must be boring for you – but it just is what I’m doing right now. This is the largest compilation I’ve done so far — using 48 shots with camera in vertical position. No anchor points (manual points) were needed. In other words, am getting the hang of how many degrees each movement should be, both for vertical columns and horizontal columns.
So far I’ve been doing all the shooting with the f2.8 20mm Canon lens. Next test up will be with the 50mm f1.4 lens. I’m slowly learning what’s what. And if you tune back in, maybe in a week or two, I think you’ll start to see more interesting images. (Although even this one might be interesting if you saw it at larger than life size).
Experiments continue. One row, 20 degrees for each shot x 8 shots. Just one row. 20mm lens on cropped sensor. Yesterday, I ran into the trouble of not enough overlapping at 36 degree notches. By lowering the degree notch to 20 degree there is more overlap of shots.
Next experiment up – to begin shooting with the 50mm lens, and then the 100 mm lens. This shot is 14,086 pixels x 4,690 pixels. The scene is shot with the camera in portrait position revolving around the pupil exit. No manual anchors were needed. Field of view, approx. 154 degrees. Projection: Equiretangular. Now I’m going to see what I can do with a rectilinear projection of the same scene.
Flat (Rectilinear of One Row)
Last night the Nodal Ninja Panoramic Head arrived (by Fanotec). As expected – sturdy well-thought out hardware – though I admit that when I first opened the case it comes in I wasn’t sure where to start. I used the PTGui Google group for recommendations and they pointed me towards some excellent videos. The whole idea is that you want to be able to take a series of images without running into Parallax errors. (At least that’s one part of the purpose of the equipment).
As it turns out, a lot of the included washers, extenders, nuts and bolts in little plastic bags are there for specific types of lenses or camera bodies. At any rate, this was the video that really did make it all click for me (no pun intended). In fact, right now my biggest problem is getting the damned camera strap out of the way :)
And here’s the current state of my zeroing in on that non-parallax point.
Good Overview of Panoramic Photography
After getting the parallax business worked out – took eight shots with NN – with 20mm lens — f4 — 30 secs each — and stitched without any manual points being added – in PTGui – then color cleaned up a bit in NIK. The size of the final file is about 8000 px x 6000 px (shot with Canon T4i). The detail is quite astonishing. You can read the title of every book in the bookshelf (if you ever wanted to).
100% of calendar (on left).
The calendar on the wall (left) is a calendar by Matt Weber about checkered taxi cabs. Once you get the hang of it — (I’m on day two or three) you begin to think about all the ways the system can be used.
Continuing to experiment in the rain… So this shot would make a print of 20 x 30 inches @300 dpi, without any interpolation. It can easily go to 40 x 60 @300 dpi with interpolation without introducing artifacts. I’m still not really using the right lens for the type of large mural that I want to do. It’s going to be at least a 100mm, but right now I’ll go for the 50mm f1.4 which I have. And remember – this is all with a cropped sensor.
I found that PTGui has a good GRID TOOL where you can tell it how many rows and columns you shot as well as what the “yaw” was, i.e. the tilt. There’s a lot to experiment with. And the contraption is light enough to carry around in a backpack or camera bag. All in all – day two and I’m a pretty happy camper. Hopefully I can get through some other work I’ve got to finish and get out to Central Park tomorrow where I’ll do some preliminary mural tests.
From what I see – PTGui is one of those programs that you can work with for years and still discover new features. It’s really exactly what I was looking for. I’m just going to have to figure out a few more things such as what all those “plugs” with wire on them are for in the rotator; and can I really do a grid and leave most of the stitching to PTGui. So far – that looks promising. In this shot, which was made up of 21 raw files, it was nice enough to do 90% of the stitching on its own; and let me know that there were two images that needed to have “anchors” put in to let it know how two images should go together. Easy enough.
