distortion from an iffy pano

yeah, iffy is the word. was a very quick capture as I had no time to take out the tripod and set up on the pavement etc....however its created this horrible bendy distortion. this was a quick stitch attempt as well, using autostitch (which has proved ok in the past)....any idea how to fix this?

would hugin+Ptools prove any better than autostitch (since its supposed to have distortion correction)

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Tripod isn't necessary. but you should shoot portrait not landscape so you have more material to work with. Usually you should shoot full manual for panoramas, but in this case i'd have experimented to get the right hand side of the building a lot brighter. Shoot it again if you can, as it is it's no much good mainly because you're missing the bottom left. Shadows/highlights might have helped otherwise.

xft; I found this site off another link posted by someone on this forum; and I can't tell you how much easier and better my panos have started turning out.

I call this one page the rosetta stone for digital panoramas
http://exolucere.ca/ar​ticles/create-panorama

With the distortion; pay special care to the part after the preview heading. In Hugin you can pick the same photo on the left and right; then add control points to make a line horizontal or vertical; I did NOT know this when trying to do this on my own!

Panos are a multi step process; but man; my first pano this way was thousands of times better than all my other tries put together! Expect the enblend step to take a while. On my 3.2 ghz hyperthreading machine; the enblend step can take 3-4 hours with these huge tiffs (6-8 images).

Good Luck!

cheers for the link T, looks like a good read.

tim, like I said it was a fast shot - where the tour bus driver lets you off for all of 20secs and then you have to be back on again. should've used centre weighted (think i was on evaluative and Av at the time) but can't really go back since the damn thing is in downtown sydney, and I'm in the UK. grr.