need help with stitching or something

i shot my daughter's marching band on the field for the director. i needed an ultra-wide vs the 24-70 i was using. if the director had told me ahead of time, i could have brought the wifes Tsomethingi and the 10-22 but i didnt know about this until i was already at the stadium..

i couldnt get the entire band in the shot and tried to get the director to make some minor adjustments to which he refused. ive heard of stitching images so i shot some hoping to be able to do some overlap...

i read a couple of other threads here that listed some software but when i attempted to edit, the resulting image had about 10yds of the formation cut out of the middle, including a couple of drum majors and other band members!

i need some serious help figuring this one out. like i said i normally shoot a 24-70 on my 5d3 but would have brought some more appropriate gear had i known i needed it...

What software do you have? Lightroom, Photoshop, something else?

Post some examples of the shots that you do have, at least enough shots so each band member is seen at least once, so we can see what you're working with.

If you can post forum-sized images of the sections you want to stitch together (2 images per post) I can try to stitch them and give you some feedback. If you were standing fairly far away and all of the subjects are roughly in the same plane, then you should be able to stitch the images, provided they overlap enough.

Of course, there could be any number or reasons why it may not work, so some example images would be great. If you do not want to publicly post them, PM me.

kirk

ive got PSE 10 and LR 4 updated to 5 something...

i only needed the end 3-4 members to move in between the 35 yd lines (if all members would have only moved about half step left or right (including the diagonals in the back) they would have fit with plenty of room and the lines could have been touched up with very minor adjustments but the director runs things the way HE wants to run them. honestly he can be a real pain...

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One very possible factor could be if your shots do not have overlapping image sections. This is something that needs to be worked out as you shoot -- stitching/pano software can easily get lost without a decent amount of overlap. It's commonly advised that one includes 20% of overlap om relevant sides of each image.

you can see in the pictures, ive got about 90% overlap...

did you take them from the same spot? the perspective on the two seems too different for a regular straight stitch job

Yeah you moved, with stitching you really need to stay on the same spot so the perspective stays the same.

That's going to be really tough to make look right..

I'd say it's likely "doable", but you won't be using much overlap because things have moved between the two shots.

What I see as a workable approach would be to crop the left side of the first shot so you can paste it and blend it into the end of the second shot.

This would leave result "short", but that's doable, although you'd need to tinker a bit with some details with the sky and the lamp post. The good news is that at the end you can crop the resulting image, ending up with less height, but that would be OK, the sky can be cropped and definitely the lower ground "stuff"!

Ouch.

Generally, when you expect to stitch multiple images together, you want to move the camera only minimally - otherwise, perspective and parallax are working against you. They even make special tripod attachments that eliminate the tiny amount of parallax induced by rotating the camera on a fixed tripod head - if you're not rotating around the "nodal point" of the lens, you'll get a little bit of parallax error.

Moving as much as you did is going to make this one really tough. Though you have a lot of overlap, the overlapping areas don't line up. In the first image, the 50-yard-line is angled from bottom right to top left; in the second image, it's angled in the exact opposite direction.

You MIGHT be able to get around this by using some of the Photoshop Transform tools (skew? transform?) to make the 50-yard-line vertical, then stitching along that line. That might get you some weird leaning band members, though. Cutting out just the left edge of the top image, and sticking it onto the left edge of the bottom image, might work a little better.

If you have two images taken from standing in the same spot - ideally, the 50-yard-line - that will improve the process and the results considerably.

Kirk, you got your work cut out for ya

Why didn't you shoot from the 50yd line and back up?

W/ the perspective being off between the two shots, it's going to be a lot of work. I just gave it a try and I quit because it'll take more work than it's worth IMO and still never be correct. Sorry.

The shifting (moving your position) between shots creates a lot of parallax with which stitchers cannot cope. I tried several different methods and they all break down.

There is a blender called "SmartBlend" for PCs only that is supposed to take parallax error into account when blending. Perhaps?

kirk

DagoImaging wrote in post #18168920
Why didn't you shoot from the 50yd line and back up?

I assume that if he backed up any more, he'd fall off the back of the bleachers.

What would probably have worked better would been to have been standing on the bleachers at the 50yd line and shot two or three shots: for example LEFT, MIDDLE, RIGHT of the formation, by keeping the camera (and his feet) in the same place and rotating (panning) the camera to get the coverage needed. Then the parallax error would be small enough to stitch no problem. The problem occurs when you translate your point of view (move your feet) - then parallax becomes a real headache. The problem is even more apparent when you have such a highly structured ground (with lines on it!) that reveal even the smallest errors that may be hideable with a more random ground texture.

kirk