This is a quick guide on creating panos.

Ive been taking panos for a few years and have finally got it down to an art, so here are a few tips that should save you the pain and frustration of having to learn it all from scratch (the frustration is caused by slow cpus and the pain by cranking the handle on the side ).

*** Taking the photos

Firstly, you should use a camera that allows you to set the exposure and ideally allows recording in a raw format.  Compact cameras will cause you problems when it comes to blending the shots together - I started on a compact but only really started getting good results after I got my first dSLR.

Allow for a lot of overlap between shots.  I usually leave at least a 40-50% overlap between shots as this really helps avoid any blending/stitching problems later.  Note that provided you have a huge overlap, you can take wide angle shots with parallax errors and still get a good stitch.

Panos do not have to be 360 degrees!  Pick something of interest, zoom in and take a row/column/matrix of shots.


*** Stitch the shots together

When processing the raw, make sure that the settings used are exactly the same for all shots (including the whitebalance - set it, dont let it stay on the auto setting or it will not be the same for all shots).

Dont try and do any fancy levels at this stage.  Your goal at the moment is to get a good stitch, not to make it look visually good (but do check that the processed shots are approximately of the same exposure otherwise have another go with your raw decoder - after this step, the cpu time required jumps so get them correct now).

Get autopano-sift (you can get the plain autopano app but the sift algorithm is the best), dont be confused by the pay-for program, follow the link below.

Autopano-sift will take quite a while with all of the options turned on so go and cook dinner.

Once autopano-sift has finished, locate the hugin config file that it has created and load it into hugin.

Learn how to use hugin before doing any large stitches - make sure that you understand how to create horizon lines - your best off following some of the tutorials on that site.

Once optimised in hugin, select the output type as multiple_tif and check the option button for enblend (I dont have it infront of me so cant remember exactly what it says, but it basicly reduces the filesize of the output tiffs in such a way that enblend still understands how they fit together).  Also, set the quality of the stitch to bilinear as this seems the fastest for good results.

When you finally get to the enblend stage, make sure you choose the -a flag as this will really speed the process up (especially if you have a lot of shots and potentially a lot of blend steps).  The other flag to take note of is -m as this will allow you to tell enblend how much memory to use before it starts eating your hdd space as swap in the current directory (on some of my larger stitches, it often eats 3 or 4 gig ontop of the 2gig of ram its using)

All thats left now is to open the stitch in your favourite image app (not paint! or you will be waiting until xmas for it to load) and do levels, crop it, add borders and most importantly, show us it.

*** Software links and summary of their operation

ufraw http://ufraw.sf.net/ - for converting the raw (has a nice batch mode)

autopano-sift  http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~nowozin/autopano-sift/ - Automatically finds stitching points - dont fully rely on it as it can get it wrong sometimes plus you may need to add in some horizontal/vertial lines in hugin.

hugin http://hugin.sf.net/ - does the aligning and outputs a bunch of tiffs for enblend.

enblend http://enblend.sf.net/ - blends the tiffs from hugin into a single image - you need lots of ram/swap for this stage.  

And finally I use The Gimp, but if you are in windows, use whatever is familiar to you.


*** And Finally

If anyone has any questions/suggestions, drop me a line.  Or if you want to see any examples, see my gallery at http://panfantastic.co.uk/gallery/

:banghead:

I dont know how. Hmm, dont think theres an option that I see...

good post mate. will have to give it ago sometime.

Heres one I did about a year earlier lol...  :-)

http://www.asse55.dsl.pipex.com/Pictures/Photos/Gardens.jpg

Not terrific but I was pleased with it.  Any good? Thats the view overlooking Powys Castles Gardens as you come into the gardens itself.

I really should get more involved in this subforums tbh.  Ive taken the odd good photo on my dads camera every so often.

Heres one I did about a year earlier lol...  :-)

http://www.asse55.dsl.pipex.com/Pictures/Photos/Gardens.jpg

Not terrific but I was pleased with it.  Any good? Thats the view overlooking Powys Castles Gardens as you come into the gardens itself.

I really should get more involved in this subforums tbh.  Ive taken the odd good photo on my dads camera every so often.

Thats excellent.  :bowdown:

The stiching was done with the Canon Zoombrowser Software.  Yes I still have the individual shots, I might have another go at it.

It was my first real go at a panoramic shot.

The stiching was done with the Canon Zoombrowser Software.

Ah, that explains it.  That canon software is prety basic.

aye, but I dont understand how they can charge for their lower quality products when Enblend, hugin, auto-panosift do it for free and do it really really well.