Help on a night panoramic shot...

[AEsco48]

as a gift to a friend i would like to take a panoramic shot from the roof of this person aprtment....hopfully at least 180 degrees....and to make it more difficult it will be a night shoot

i am an armature photographer...take good shots with my Cannon G3, but by no means an advanced photographer....

i have access to a Cannon Digital SLR, a tripod, lap top....what software do i use to merge the images? edit: i do have photshop CS

Also bc its a night shot the light intensity from one area to the other will varry....so i guess the camera settings will have to change...how will this affect the picture once its merged...will there be dark and bright frames?

[Jon]

You can use PhotoStitch, which comes as part of the standard Canon photo software, or PhotoShop. For the exposure - you want to set the camera on "M" for Manual, and not change the exposure as you take the series of pictures (which you can do with your G3 as well as with the DSLR) so you don't get sudden shifts in brightness as you move around. There's a very good thread on making panoramas here somewhere - give the search engine a whirl.

[prime80]

However, if you must change exposure, change it with shutter speed only, so you don't alter the Depth of Field from shot to shot.

[erik-nl]

it is VERY important to keep all settings identical for all shots is a sequence.
(white balance was something I frequently forgot before I started shooting RAW)

a far better program than PhotoStitch is PTGui.

http://www.ptgui.com/

it is a bit of a chore to install everything needed, but the results are really worth it.

[heffsarmy]

The main point about shooting panos is too find the nodal point of the lens you are using. You need a pano head for this, I use a kaindan pano head which is expensive, you can make up a pano head yourself (google on the net), this reduces the problem of parallax, but for distacne objects parallax is not a problem, but you will be shooting from the top of your friends apartment so I'm sure it will be a problem there...set your camera in portrait position and set your white balance and exposure manaully, take different readings to get a clearer idea of your exposure setup, when taking the shots have at least 30% overlap for lining up each shot...there is free software available on the net search for pano tools, tricky to use....I use software from realviz sticher 4.04...this is expensive software, but its excellent and easy to use once you get used to it...canon photostich is pretty crap to be honest

[robertwgross]

...canon photostich is pretty crap to be honest

I've never had any problem with it.

It must be the photographer.

---Bob Gross---

[nitsch]

If you only have PSCS just stitch them together manually using that. A bit more time consuming but use layers and merge them carefully and your results will be pixel perfect if you take your time. Plus you get the added bonus of it being far more rewarding than getting software to do it for you.

[Poco]

www.autostitch.net is much more forgiving if your photos are not perfectly lined up or if the settings are slightly off. It is very rewarding to put the photos in and get out a perfect panorama with no manual user input :-). I've never tried it with night photos though, but it takes very little manual time investment (just a lot of CPU time investment). It does a great job with my handheld shots where I literally put the camera in continuous shutter mode and turn around slowly.

[AEsco48]

The main point about shooting panos is too find the nodal point of the lens you are using. You need a pano head for this, I use a kaindan pano head which is expensive, you can make up a pano head yourself (google on the net), this reduces the problem of parallax, but for distacne objects parallax is not a problem, but you will be shooting from the top of your friends apartment so I'm sure it will be a problem there...set your camera in portrait position and set your white balance and exposure manaully, take different readings to get a clearer idea of your exposure setup, when taking the shots have at least 30% overlap for lining up each shot...there is free software available on the net search for pano tools, tricky to use....I use software from realviz sticher 4.04...this is expensive software, but its excellent and easy to use once you get used to it...canon photostich is pretty crap to be honest

"but you will be shooting from the top of your friends apartment so I'm sure it will be a problem there..."

The shot is going to be from the pent house....overlooking the port of Miami and the bay....actually its going to be from the top floor of the building in the center you see here that is under construction....from that point toward where this photo was taken...

http://www.photopost.com/photopost/data/500/medium/78187foating_city_2.jpg

so distant objects....so im confused will parallax be or not be a problem?

[UncleDoug]

"but you will be shooting from the top of your friends apartment so I'm sure it will be a problem there..."

The shot is going to be from the pent house....overlooking the port of Miami and the bay....actually its going to be from the top floor of the building in the center you see here that is under construction....from that point toward where this photo was taken...

http://www.photopost.com/photopost/data/500/medium/78187foating_city_2.jpg

so distant objects....so im confused will parallax be or not be a problem?


If you don't want to purchase a pano head.....and you have PSCS.....

Level your tripod, level your camera.
Use at least a 60mm lense, to help reduce any paralax issue.
Plan your shot out. Take your exposure reading from somewhere in the middle of your pano "sweep".
Then lock EVERYTHING down. I mean EVERYTHING set to manual. Even focus. Any sort of mid sweep adjustments will result in a definitive band that you will see.
Take your shots, making sure to overlap atleast 30%.
If you want insurance, bracket a couple of sweeps.

From these shots you should have a good pano.

[tim]

Photostich works great. Shoot in M mode, meter for the brightest part of the sky.

[AEsco48]

If you don't want to purchase a pano head.....and you have PSCS.....

Level your tripod, level your camera.
Use at least a 60mm lense, to help reduce any paralax issue.
Plan your shot out. Take your exposure reading from somewhere in the middle of your pano "sweep".
Then lock EVERYTHING down. I mean EVERYTHING set to manual. Even focus. Any sort of mid sweep adjustments will result in a definitive band that you will see.
Take your shots, making sure to overlap atleast 30%.
If you want insurance, bracket a couple of sweeps.

From these shots you should have a good pano.

thanx for the advice...

what does "bracket a couple of sweeps" mean?

thanx

[UncleDoug]

thanx for the advice...

what does "bracket a couple of sweeps" mean?

thanx

Sorry about the lingo.

When I say sweep I mean the series of shots from left to right(or right to left) when you are shooting a pano.

Now, to "bracket a couple of sweeps" what I do is meter for what I figure should be the exposure I want, lock everything down, and perform a sweep.
Then increase the exposure from the original and perform another sweep.
Then decrease the exposure from the original and perform another sweep.
Now you have a hi, low, and mid exposure pano to choose from, just incase your metering and exposure choice was off a bit.

All you are doing here is breaking down a single shot into a few steps.
Treat a sweep as a single shot when thinking about bracketing.

Make sense?

[Poco]

One (two?) word(s) - "Autostitch" - it's free.

Admitedly it only does JPEG, but you will be amazed at the results http://www.autostitch.net for those panos where everything isn't perfect. It can even handle different exposures between shots and will automatically layout the photos so you could theoretically take the photos in a circle pattern and it would work (though I haven't tried this if there is a hole in the middle :-)

[mattsiesco]

I personally wouldnt put my trust into automatic software, just because if one little detail is off, you have to do more difficult post-editing than the method I currently prefer.

I juse use elements and line them up myself, then if somethings slightly off, I erase that part of the layer and it blends perfect, its worked perfect for me, however I know the auto-programs will line them up better as I am quite impatient at times. If they made a program that lined the photos up as Photoshop files with seperate layers, you'd have me sold:).

[erik-nl]

PTgui can produce feathered .psd or .TIF files for further processing with Photoshop.
AND it can import, manipulate, and export files with a colordepth of 16 bits.
Of course the resulting temporary and final files are HUGE in 16 bit mode!

I usually convert my RAW files with PS to 16 bits TIFF-files, making sure that all shots are converted identically.
Because I always shoot in portrait orientation I then rotate them, but that is all I do with PS at this stage.
These TIFF-files are then adjusted to fit by PTgui and either exported as seperate feathered files or combined into one big file, in my case a (huge) 16 bit .TIF.
This file is then optimized in Photoshop the usual way, as if it came straight from the camera.

Using this method I have assembled as many as 24 shots into one, resulting in .psd files as large as 950 MB.
Just be sure to have lots and lots of disk space available for temporary files, about one GB per shot
(so if you have a sequence of eight shots you will need about 8 GB of temporary file space).

PTgui is free to use for 30 days, that really should be enough for one single project I think.
The only problem is.... making these BIG pictures is quite addictive.