Silicon Valley from the bottom

Took this pano from Santa Teresa County Park on the south side of San Jose. It's my first attempt at panoramic, and I like the result so much I'm probably going to have a poster made of it, hence the border and title.

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Nice image with a lot of detail in the full version - what ISO? Seems to be a lot of noise...
Regards
David

Agree, the pic is awesome, but it seems too much grainy. suppose you used high ISO ?

Hmmm... I had noticed the noise, but kinda shrugged it off. The photos were shot ISO400. The originals aren't nearly as noisy, now that I look closely. Guess somewhere along the line my PP messed it up. I ran USM on the whole image, bumped up the saturation a tad, and adjusted the levels on the bottom to lighten it up (this is all after stitching). Perhaps I need a higher threshhold for the USM?

Well, I'll play around with it some more. Thanks for the comments!

<< 15 minutes later... >>

Yep, that's the problem. Had the USM threshold too low. Darn, wish I hadn't just shrugged off the noise earlier, 'cause wouldn't you know it, I already took it to the printers. Oh well, live and learn.

I was planning on giving one away anyways.

The detail is really what made me decide to have a large print made - there's no other way to present the photo that allows both the overall scale and the fine detail to be appreciated, which is necessary for what I'm trying to convey.

Here's a couple examples of that detail (100% crops):

The huge airship hangers at Moffett Federal Airfield (about 20 miles away):

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The detail in the large version is really amazing - and with the kit lens...

I noticed the noise but the detail was so good it didn't matter.

Never seen hugin or enblend but will give them a try (I'm a cheap software junkie). GIMP is also new and will require some checking out first...thanks for the image and the info.

Boy, do I know that view. My wife and I worked in the Blossom Valley/Santa Teresa area for many years, and we often drove up to the park to have our brown bag lunches.

Beautifully done. Thanks for the nostalgic trip.

Thanks for the kind comments!

Titus - I'm running Linux at home and work, so really the only choice is to use freeware. The GIMP is an excellent program, and has many of the features of PS, but I do find it lacking in a few areas. It keeps getting better and better, though! Hugin is really just a GUI frontend for the panorama tools library, which appears to be used by quite a few programs.

belmondo - It's a great park... I just moved here from the midwest a couple months ago, and even though I live and work just a mile or two from it, seems not many people know of it. I found it when I was browsing a map, and figured it could make for a good hike. Saw some nice wildlife (a couple deer, and a few of nature's roto-tiller, the wild pig), which really surprised me given its proximity to suburbia. I'll definitely be heading there again.

I got the print back, and it looks GREAT! The noise is visible, but you have to look pretty darn close. The price was really good... $30 for a 48"x14.4" print at Kinko's. Now I just need to figure out how to frame it...