Stitching

[andrew_j_murphy]

Not sure whether this is generally frowned upon in "proper" camera circles, but thought I'd ask :)

I'm considering buying a D30 as my first foray into digital stills (I have a digital video camera but stills quality is...poor) - I've posted on the Marketplace forum if anyone has any tips.

I've found stitching to be quite handy with low res stills etc and know that some cameras have facilities to help you get the exposure settings right etc.

Does the D30 have this sort of feature?

Been reading the other posts on the D30 with interest. Just need to see if I can "justify" the cost...

[Roger_Cavanagh]

Andrew,

The D30 doesn't do anything in-camera, but it does come with software to stitch images together.

There are several other offerings, and some people even say they prefer to do it manually in Photoshop.

Most of the packages try to match across colour/exposure across images, but obviously there's a limit to what they can achieve.

Regards,

[soumya63]

andrew_j_murphy wrote:
Not sure whether this is generally frowned upon in "proper" camera circles, but thought I'd ask :)

I'm considering buying a D30 as my first foray into digital stills (I have a digital video camera but stills quality is...poor) - I've posted on the Marketplace forum if anyone has any tips.

I've found stitching to be quite handy with low res stills etc and know that some cameras have facilities to help you get the exposure settings right etc.

Does the D30 have this sort of feature?

Been reading the other posts on the D30 with interest. Just need to see if I can "justify" the cost...

I presume that by stitching you mean joining segments of a panorama into a single panoramic picture? If that so, then the best software I have ever come across is Canon Photostitch which I have received with my Canon S800 printer. This software has intelligence and automatically recognizes stitching edges and aligns the segments accurately. No need to manually drag the images to align the overlapping regions.

On the second thought, it appears, you might have asked for photo editing software, which you will receive as a bundle along with D30, it is Photoshop LE. It is good enough for most of non photoshop savvy users.

Well, you can not get a decent still quality with a video camera due to two reasons:

1) Video optics is designed with the intention for achieving higher aperture and higher Zooming capability. Image sharpness is not a major criteria cause our television set, including HDTV are nowhere nearly capable of displaying high resolution pictures. So a cheap Digital still camera almost always produces a better and sharper picture than a video camera.

2) Image sensor for video cameras are also designed differently. They are designed for low light sensitivity and continuous use. Picture noise is again not a big factor for video. The image sensor technology in Digital still camera is optimized for minimum image noise.

So you can see why you are not quite satisfied with the quality of your stills from video camera. One last word, if the source picture is bad, no amount of tweaking or 'stitching' will make it as good as a good source.

Go for D30 or EOS1D. Best of luck. :D

[andrew_j_murphy]

Thanks for the replies gents.

I'm currently using "Canon's" photostitch software (it was developed by another firm who are now only doing 360deg digital imaging I believe, can't recall the name though) and agree that it's brilliant. It even works on a Mac which is even better.

Also agree that a bad source won't give a decent picture no matter what. Having said that I have some reasonable stuff from the video camera and it was bought for moving images really (at which it excels).

Guess I now have to decide between the D30 and more of a deposit on a house. Tough choice, but then you can't take pictures with a house, can you :)

[AJSJones]

Andrew

I have had significant success with PhotoStitch from my D30.

In answer to your original question, it does not specifically have camera settings for this but the only thing you need to do is have the same settings for each piece of the panorama. i.e. manual setting to fix speed and aperture the same for all. Check the brightest and darkest parts of the panorama and set midway between and don't touch until you've taken all the shots.

Avoid really wide-angle lenses because of the light fall-off at the edges (I had to create a radial gradient filter for my panorama which used too wide a lens - it was a panorama from Easter Island so I couldn't go back easily!!!!)

Tripod will always help keep the shots lined up but choosing the axis of rotation isn't straightforward - film/sensor plane, node of lens etc, so some segment-to-segment distortion is inevitable and that's what PhotoStitch mainly corrects.

Couple of times I had to fix the images (identically!) in Photoshop and then re-import them into PhotoStitch (step1) to be allowed to vary the lens focal length in the Merge Set-Up in the second step of the process (otherwise there's a tag in the image file which tells the PhotoStich program how the image was acquired and the result isn't always optimal)

This was "learning the hard way" - so

use
1) a non-ultra-wide lens and
2) a tripod and
3) the same exposure for each piece


Good luck

Andy

[john_houghton]

I've only recently acquired a D30 but I have done a few stitches, mostly mostly the Sigma 20mm f1.8 lens. Not having an auto exposure lock feature, I used manual mode on my first pano to get the same exposure for each frame. Unfortunately, I used auto white balance, which gave me a different white balance on each frame despite the equal exposure setting. As I didn't use raw output format, this was not easy to rectify. So, I learnt to use raw mode and/or select an appropriate fixed white balance setting in addition to manual exposure.

I find I get the best stitches with Panorama Tools (plus either PTGui or PTAssembler). It has far more flexibility than most stitchers and will deliver the pano as a layered Photoshop file with masks. This means that it is a simple matter to adjust the line of the seams to skirt around problem areas caused by object movement and parallax. E.g. This is a hand held vertical stitch of two landscape shots. The tree branches inevitably moved about a bit between shots, so the seam meanders through the branches to give a (hopefully) invisible stitch, if not a strictly perfect one:
http://homepage.dtn.ntl.com/j.houghton/dap3.htm