Photo stitch question

I went to Mt St Helens today and took some pictures so I could try photo stitching for the first time only to find that you can't use a wide angle with the photo stitching program I have (the one that came with my camera).

My question: Is there another photo stitching program that will allow me to do this with my wide angle lens or is it impossible to photo stitch using this lens? (I shot at 17mm)

Thank you

Great that you made it to St. Helens -- it's an awesome place.

I haven't used Photostitch, but there really isn't a reason why shots with your 10D and 17-40 shouldn't work with a stitching program. It's about finding areas in your shots with overlapping pixels. The key is to take your shots so that they overlap by say a third so the wide angle effects are left out. If you don't have that latitude in your images things can struggle. Also if your exposure and white balance differ between shots you will have problems with seams. Software for this has evolved and can help with these things, but at some point you pay.

You might try hugin, a popular freeware program.

17mm induces too much distortion. It's hard for a stitching program to remove the curvature before trying to assemble the pano and with a WA lens, most people bite off too much real estate per frame.

Better Technique:
- Manual Exposure
- RAW or Constant White Balance Pre Set
- Standard Lens (35-85mm)
- Portrait Orientation (Gives your image more sky and foreground for cropping if need be)
- no more than 20 degrees of pan per frame.

If you're really aware of what's in each frame and what needs to be level, you can even do these hand-held quite easily although a tripod will help avoid "horizon creep."

THIS was a 15-17 frame hand-held pano shot at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and assembled by CS3. The constant horizon made it fairly easy but I've done others that worked as well without such a flat plane accross the middle.

Jay, good stuff, but note that the OP was using the 17-40 on a 10D, so the 17mm would have the same field of view as a 24mm (or so) on the 5D.

IMO, 24mm is still on the wide side for Panos. Honestly, I've not tested my 17-40 on an APS-C body with an eye toward the physics of the lens as it pertains to distortion.

I can simply state that Panos seem to assemble with less fuss when they're shot with a more "flat field" lens.

photobug5880 wrote in post #10518406
I went to Mt St Helens today and took some pictures so I could try photo stitching for the first time only to find that you can't use a wide angle with the photo stitching program I have (the one that came with my camera).

My question: Is there another photo stitching program that will allow me to do this with my wide angle lens or is it impossible to photo stitch using this lens? (I shot at 17mm)

Thank you

Better than Photoshop (does images that photoshop couldn't) - Microsoft ICE - http://research.micros​oft.com …m/redmond/group​s/ivm/ICE/

And apparently the new Live Photogallery uses ICE... - but I can't find a link to MS Essentials Beta...

After changing some settings I finally got the program to stitch my photos! Only problem: how do you get rid of the lines???

Were you using a Polarizing Filter at all?

Otherwise, you've got differences in exposure or else you're seeing some vignetting at the edges of each frame.

To create a seamless pano the exposure should be done in manual so that it does not alter, and the white balance should also be fixed. AWB is not a good choice when shooting panos.

However with painstaking work it can be fixed after the event but you need to have access to every layer seperately to tweak colours contrast and exposure levels. I generally choose to assemble my panos by hand because I feel I get that little more control.

photobug5880 wrote in post #10522812
After changing some settings I finally got the program to stitch my photos! Only problem: how do you get rid of the lines???

FlyingPhotog wrote in post #10522831
Were you using a Polarizing Filter at all?

Otherwise, you've got differences in exposure or else you're seeing some vignetting at the edges of each frame.

Lowner wrote in post #10523051
To create a seamless pano the exposure should be done in manual so that it does not alter, and the white balance should also be fixed. AWB is not a good choice when shooting panos.

However with painstaking work it can be fixed after the event but you need to have access to every layer seperately to tweak colours contrast and exposure levels. I generally choose to assemble my panos by hand because I feel I get that little more control.

You can actually get lines with a manual exposure - and it only depends on the programme...
I did a panorama from the top of the Gasometer - Photoshop added white lines where images merged - Microsoft ICE didn't.
Sometimes Photoshop adds lines, sometimes it doesn't - same is true for any other programme.

I suggest you retry with ICE as its been quite good to me - but I can't think of any way of actively getting rid of them - the programme needs to process them correctly in the first place.

The lines in PS should go away once flattened.

FlyingPhotog wrote in post #10526090
The lines in PS should go away once flattened.

Good to know - never knew that... the next time I try I'll try to remember.

Wonder which programme the OP used though...

I doubt it! A wide field of view will show the variation in sky tone no matter how it's achieved. You hope to record a gradation in tone. Start with constant manual settings across the whole series of shots.

Not all stitching programs work optimally all the time. I use three programs, Photostitch being one of them. The one I use most is Hugin (currently V 2009.4.0) though it's constantly updated. It's free, more optioned than Photostitch, but it reduces your originals to 1600 pixels on the longest side.
Good luck with your pans. Am.

It looks to me like the seams are simply vignetting -- try cropping the images to get rid of it before stitching and see if that helps.

One solution is to use a blending mask. Possibly need to do it section by section, two frames at a time. Alternatively, as its a reasonably constant sky colour, just replace the sky with a suitable solid colour using whatever blending mode that suits.

I'm with Tony, its made worse due to the use of a wide angle lens. Using a longer lens, maybe in portrait orientation might have made the problem less.

But its fixable. It just needs a little work.