Possible to do a 360 pano with cs4 Photomerge?

Hey everyone. I work for a concert venue, and wanted to see if I could do a 360 degree panoramic photo of the inside of the venue.

I tried it today, and here is what I did.

Set up a Tokina fisheye @ 10mm in portrait orientation on a manfrotto tripod/head. It is not a panoramic head, just a 3 way tilt head. I leveled the tripod, set exposure, and began shooting.

I took about 7 images and made sure there was plenty of overlap.

I repeated this process in landscape orientation, and repeated the process again in both orientations with a 17-55 IS @ 17mm.

When I went home and tried to use photomerge in CS4 (set it on automatic mode) I got garbage results. Photoshop only seemed to use about half to 3/4ths of the pictures I took, and just stuck the other ones on the side. Is this a software thing, do I need something else? Or is Photomerge capable of doing this?

I seemed to get the best results with the 17mm in landscape orientation, but it was still awful -- clear seams, images not lined up, and not a 360 degree view.

What am I doing wrong here -- is it an equipment thing? I have seen people say you need a panoramic head, but I have also seen people say they have done this hand held. Do I need more overlap? Do I need different software?

I want to try again, so if anyone has any insights, it would be very helpful!

It sounds challenging, since in a nightclub you have people who move around and the software will struggle to match the pixels together.

You could try other software, get Hugin or get a trial of some more developed stuff and see if something works.

As far as CS goes, the Merge utility does work, often well, but nothing is perfect at everything. Things to try would include doing this in steps, taking a block of, say, 2-4 shots and blending them together, then doing another block, then seeing if you can merge two blocks together.

Like I said, the problem will be in getting details to merge when the details include people. You will likely want to have Photoshop open some of these as layers with masks and will likey need to manually blend things for the best results.

You might want to check out Microsoft ICE. I have had a few pano's that CS5 did the same thing you are describing but ICE stitched them just fine.

Microsoft Ice

bthomsen wrote in post #10591137
You might want to check out Microsoft ICE. I have had a few pano's that CS5 did the same thing you are describing but ICE stitched them just fine.

Microsoft Ice

WOW. I love you BT. That worked swimmingly.

ok, well that wasn't nice -- I got ONE image from it, and then the other ones were all messed up. Even when I went to re-load the exact same set of imges from the one that worked, it didn't work after that..... any suggestions? What settings do you use BT?

PTGUI- works for me very well but it has fun in symetrical buildings as it some times puts the left on the right which looks fun but overall does a good job.
it stitched this for me (below) with only a few minor glitches which were easy to resolve where it was matching the floor patern on the left with the one on the right as they are identical. there is a function which lets you look at accuracy of control points (tools / control point table) and if you go to the list of these and just delete any points with values of greater then 50 it seems to solve all the problems of it doing silly things.
I actually find that modern buildings with big expanses of white are very hard to stitch.

Any how hope that helps and PTGUI is not too expensive

just seen a couple of your other threads on this project of yours and with regards to the tripod i would suggest getting one which will actually pivot around the nodal point of the lens. either a real one or one like mine .
I was fortunate as i bought the manfrotto landscape tripod from a friend for £150 and then spent about £3 to knocked up this out of some scrap ply a few bolts and a tripod head from a spare cheap tripod i already had. as you can see it is not pretty but id does the job and pretty well. it now rotates horizonatally and vertically about the nodal point of the lens. took about 2 hrs to make and about 1 hour to fine tune the exact nodal point ... hense some additional drill holes .

i have 4 presets for putting a bolt through to give me good overlapping and then just do the full 360 degrees with 3 shots (-2 0 +2) every 20 degrees. Run the files through photomatix for HDR and then into PTGUI to stitch. Ptgui can stitch for HDR out put but it takes a lot longer for it to do it and i find it more cumbersome that way.