anyone know any free PHOTO STITCH/PANORAMA tutorials?

Hey Guys,

Im gonna start shooting Panorama shots and was wondering if anyone knew of any good tutorials online about how to start shooting them.. like techniques, tips ect.. and how to finally stitch them together??

thanks

It's a lot easier than you think. Just get out there and experiment!

Golden rule: Set the camera in Manual mode so you get the same exposure in all the different shots. And set the White Balance manually rather than leaving it in automatic, so the colours are the same in each photo.

Tripod: For landscape-type panoramas, a tripod is desirable but by no means essential. The panorama I've attached was shot hand-held. Of course if you want to do advanced things like 360-degree panoramas then a good tripod with a panoramic head is essential.

Software: Canon PhotoStitch (free with my 350D) is incredibly simple to use and often gives decent results. AutoStitch (free download from the AutoStitch website) usually does a better job. Although AutoStitch has zillions of parameters, the only one that you need to worry about is how big you want the output to be!

Warning: this can get addictive.

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StewartR wrote:
It's a lot easier than you think. Just get out there and experiment!

Golden rule: Set the camera in Manual mode so you get the same exposure in all the different shots. And set the White Balance manually rather than leaving it in automatic, so the colours are the same in each photo.

Tripod: For landscape-type panoramas, a tripod is desirable but by no means essential. The panorama I've attached was shot hand-held. Of course if you want to do advanced things like 360-degree panoramas then a good tripod with a panoramic head is essential.

Software: Canon PhotoStitch (free with my 350D) is incredibly simple to use and often gives decent results. AutoStitch (free download from the AutoStitch website) usually does a better job. Although AutoStitch has zillions of parameters, the only one that you need to worry about is how big you want the output to be!

Warning: this can get addictive.

wow thats amazing!
esp for a hand held stitch!

im just not sure exactly what to do... do i stay in the same spot and shoot all the frames? or do i keep moving from left to right say?? to get everything in? or can you do BOTH? depends on the effect you want to get?

For best result the camera should remain in one spot, but can go any where you want just as long as the camera remains in one spot. You need to move the camera on the tripod by panning and maintain 1/3 or more of the neighboring photo so that the stitching SW will have a reference to where to stitch it together. You can even tilt it up if you want just make sure the camera and tripod remains in one spot.

so its pretty much just leaving the camera on a tripod and changing the angles of rotation on the ball head? like 10degrees to 30 degrees to ect to get the whole shot you need in??

Like lostdoggy says, the camera should stay in the same place and just swivel. The issue is that you need to avoid parallax error. This is what happens when you get two views of a scene from slightly different places; objects in the foreground and background don't line up the same way in each view. (Practical demonstration: Hold one finger up in front of you, close one eye and note how the finger lines up against the background. Then do it with the other eye. That's the effect of parallax.)

Technically speaking, in order to completely avoid parallax error the camera should swivel around something called the 'front nodal point' of the lens, rather than the focal plane (which is how most tripod mountings work). You can get special panoramic tripod heads that do this. But they are only really necessary if you are trying to shoot panoramas where objects are close to the camera, because that's when parallax errors occur. For example I once saw an amazing 360-degree panorama of the interior of a car. You couldn't do that without a panoramic head. But for landscape-type panoramas, where everything is a long way away from the lens, you can do it with an ordinary tripod or even hand-held (as in my example). The key thing is to swivel the camera/lens rather than move it.

Whether you swivel it 10 degress or 30 degrees for each shot depends on the lens you're using, because different focal lengths give different fields of view. The key thing, as lostdoggy says, is to make sure there's enough overlap for the software to recognise which bits of neighbouring photos are the same. That might depend, to a certain extent, on the nature of the subject: if it is low-contrast or has a repetitive pattern, then the software might get confused. I try to ensure that there are some easily recognisable objects or points in each overlap zone, and I adjust the overlaps as I take the shots to make sure that's the case. Most software programs allow you to designate which points in each photo correspond to one another. The demo (free!) version of AutoStitch doesn't - as the name suggests it's fully automatic - but in practice it seems to do an excellent job of working out how to overlap the photos.

Here's a practical example. At the weekend I shot a 360-degree panorama of my garden, which AutoStitch had no trouble at all with. I used my 350D with an 18mm lens, which has a field of view (in portrait mode) of about 45 degrees. So theoretically 8 shots would give me the full 360-degree coverage with no overlaps. I actually took 13 shots, so on average only 360/13=28 degrees of coverage was unique to each shot. That's about 60% of the 45 degree field of view. Effectively then, on average each photo had 20% that overlapped with the photo on its left, 60% that was unique, and 20% that overlapped with the photo on its right. In practice it's not quite that straightforward because of the distortion you get with a wideangle lens, but you get the idea. lostdoggy's suggestion of a 1/3 overlap is a good one as a general rule.

Now get out there and shoot! (Remember: manual exposure, manual white balance.) And let us know how you get on!

thankyou so much!
im gonna give it a try next few weeks so ill post one up and show ya all how i go!!
guess the only way is to give it a try.. but i always try 2 get as much info as possible before i do anything..

btw i love your avatar of the cat... very cute

There is nothing wrong with that. Its better then trying it blind. Good luck and have fun.
BTW my very first stitch photo was of my family room. It easier to do in the comfy of your own home. Especially since my PC is in the there too.

this doesn't sound hard at all, and it actually sounds like it would be a lot of fun. i just wish i had more areas around my town where i could get up high and take some cool pans of the entire city and stuff.

what are some neat general places/subjects to do panoramics of?

ok here is my 1st attempt of photostitch..
it is very hard!!
must take time to master!

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That doesn't look at all bad for a first attempt! Though it is hard to see the details because it's so small - can you post a larger example on your gallery, perhaps?

A couple of things to be wary of:

• Things which move from one shot to the next (e.g. waves) make life very hard for the stitching software.
  
• Things in the foreground can be difficult to stitch, because there's more likely to be parallax error from one shot to the next.

i cant post anything bigger than 800 pixels wide so im gonna have to show you the link at my deviantart page.. here is the direct link http://www.deviantart.​com …+sort%3Atime+-in%3Ascraps

anywayz yeah as you can see in the larger pic the sky is not spot on... will need more experience i guess to master it..

It's good. I like it. It's obviously a lovely spot and the panorama does it justice.

I see what you mean about the sky not being spot on. There are bands where one image is blended into the next. One possible reason is that the exposure settings for the shots weren't identical. Did you do everything in manual? If you shot in RAW, did you do exactly the same thing to each image before stitching them?

Another possibility is light fall-off (which some people call vignetting) towards the corners of the shots. You might be able to avoid that by having a larger overlap between shots, or by shooting with less of a wide-angle. (Wide-anlge lenses tend to have greater light fall-off.)

Have fun!

i did shoot in manual but the problem being that when i got to different sections of the stitch the light meter reading was going crazy saying the picture would be too over exposed?? do you get what i mean?? for the 1st frame the light meter was spot on (the 1st section to the left) and as i moved to the right where the water is more sunlight was shining thru and yeah i wasnt sure if i should adjust the meter accordingly??

yeah it is a nice spot.. ok i guess for 1st stitch tho.. have a long way to go.. thanx for your comment

Ah. What you need to do before you shoot the panorama is take meter readings off different parts of the scene, then decide on just one exposure setting and use that (in Manual mode) for all the photos. No adjustments. That way bright parts of the scene will come out bright, dark parts will come out dark, and so on. The best exposure is probably one that puts the brightest part of the scene right on the verge of blowing out, i.e. on the right-hand end of the histogram. That can mean some parts are very dark, but you can recover that in post-processing whereas you can't recover blown highlights. I tend to take a few test shots and check the histograms before I take the full panorama.