81.7 Megapixel Panorama of Sedona and Kirbic too

Tamron AF 28-300mm f/3.5-6.3 XR Di LD Aspherical IF for Canon

04/20/2006 01:09:03 AM · #1

Here are two sizes of a very large panorama of Sedona, Arizona USA that includes Kirbic when he visited here. Be advised they are large downloads even though reduced considerably in size for upload to the web.

720 pixel version of Sedona panorama with Kirbic - 500 megs

1000 pixel version of Sedona panorama with Kirbic - 850 Megs

Here's a full 640 pixel sized picture of Kirbic in Sedona (in red)cropped from the full sized panorama.

It is my first three tiered panorama experiment. It is made with 30 individual overlapping pictures. The full sized image is 13,260 X 6,000 pixels, or 81.7 megapixels. That is one big hummer! Printed at 300dpi it is almost 4 feet long and 2 feet tall without any upscaling. The actual 16-bit .tiff file was as large as 2.3 gigabytes while working on it.

SDW

Canon EOS-60D

04/20/2006 01:13:24 AM · #2

Great Work. The detail and lighting is great. They all keep my attention looking throughout the photograph. You got to love a great Panorama with great detail. And BTW you did a great job looks like one picture.
-SDW

Terramar

Canon EOS-7D

Tamron SP AF 11-18mm Aspherical Di II LD IF f/4.5-5.6 for Canon Digital

04/20/2006 01:13:31 AM · #3

That's pretty cool. Did you use any programs to "stitch" the pictures together?

dsidwell

Canon EF 17-40mm f/4.0L USM

04/20/2006 02:00:20 AM · #4

Super work, Steve! I love the composition and colors.

Bear_Music

Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra

Sony 24-70mm F4 Vario-Tessar T* FE OSS

04/20/2006 03:11:26 AM · #5

That's amazing...

R.

dwterry

Canon EOS-1D Mark III

Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM

04/20/2006 06:21:04 AM · #6

Love it!!!

The stitching is wonderful. But what I really love is how big and beautiful and majestic the scene is made to feel by the inclusion of the "tiny" individuals down in the bottom corner. You do good work!

04/20/2006 09:26:01 AM · #7

I did not use any special software other than Photoshop CS2's "Photomerge" capability. It took two full days to put the picture together, blend it properly and perform a few standard post processing steps, mostly because my computer is undersized and inadequately powered for the job. Even before any post processing the master file was close to 2 gigabytes most of the time. I could not retain adjustment layers and had to flatten the image a lot. Every adjustment was excrutiatingly slow.

If you want to try it, the major workflow steps to create a multi-image panorama are:

1-Capture properly overlapped pictures. It is easiest to take all pictures in portrait orientation.

2-Open, re-orient images to landscape if necessary and save in a lossless format such as 16-bit .tiff.

3-Open all the images then select and merge them.

4-If necessary, readjust individual images for best "fit". Save.

5-Open and fix blending and merge defects - this is by far the hardest part.

6-Save the properly blended but unprocessed master merge file

7-Post process normally from here.

The original 30 images used to capture the scene were all taken with the exact exposure and white balance settings using a tripod mounted camera. The images were taken in three horizontal rows in portrait orientation. I took the top row first left to right, then dropped down to take the middle row back right to left and last dropped down to take the bottom row left to right again. I used visual overlap to get the 30% overlap needed for proper merging.

The first thing I did was rotate and save all 30 source images as 16-bit .tiff files. I opened all 30 in Photoshop then selected "Photomerge" to put them together. It merged all 30 into the right positions the very first time! However, because of severe lighting differences between frames I had to reject that merge and put it together in two sections, the top two rows and the bottom row.

Whatever algorythm Photomerge uses to put images together they wind up as a puzzle-like montage of irregularly shaped angular sections from the rectangular originals. This would not be a problem if the recorded lighting were all exactly the same. Even with the same camera settings they aren't. This is caused both by decisions made by the camera's image processor and actual light changes that occur during the capture process. Different cameras and lighting conditions will minimize the problem, but I do not think this it can be eliminated.

The bottom row was very, very dark and the first merge looked like there was a row of pointed topped houses throwning darks shadows across the bottom of the merged picture. That could not be easily blended so I decided to break the merge into two phases to minimize blending fixes. That took considerable effort and hand merging adjustments. When I merged the top and bottom it left a gaping hole in the image for some strange reason. I had to copy that section from one of the original images and fill it into the hole.

I spend over a day fixing blending and merge defects.

I fixed lighting issues by selecting the affected areas and hand adjusting the lighting with selected color and brightness contrast for best fit to the surrounding areas. Then I cloned the edges for smother transition borders. I variously used the clone, blur, smudge and even the actual dodge and burn tools to make corrections. Ironically, I used the healing brush very little. If you look closely you can find where I made fixes, they are literally all over the image.

Message edited by author 2006-04-20 09:30:33.

Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM

04/20/2006 09:40:22 AM · #8

Beautiful.

But you really should check out PTAssembler or Hugin to stitch panos. It is SOOO much easier in the end, and it does an awesome job.

-Chad

dwterry

Canon EOS-1D Mark III

04/20/2006 10:19:59 AM · #9

Wow, all the more impressive that you did so much of the work by hand!

I, too, like and use PTAssembler. The nice thing is that you can have it save the result in layers so that you can manually tweak things here and there. My biggest pano to date was a 16 image stitch (4x4 layout) and even using PTAssembler that was a long process. I can't imagine the amount of dedication to put together your 30-image pano. Congrats, the effort paid off!

Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM

04/20/2006 10:31:25 AM · #10

Yes, setting the control points in PTAssembler/Hugin takes the most time, but it is easy and produces great results. You can save these control points, and use them over and over if you want to process more than one version.

-Chad

eschelar

Canon EOS-7D

04/20/2006 10:36:04 AM · #11

As mentioned in another thread, that's some amazing stuff! WOW!

Not just the image of course...

I don't suppose PTAssembler or Hugin are free? ;)

kirbic

Canon EOS R5

Canon RF 24-70mm f/2.8 L IS

04/20/2006 10:49:14 AM · #12

Wow, that came out great Steve! My pano from that shoot was only four or five shots, I think, so you've got at least double the total pixels in yours. I'd love to see a large print of that one! It's funny that you can actually kinda recognize me in the shot. That guy in the blue jacket next to me is my Arizona doppelganger! Another 5D shooter, many of the same lenses, same tripod, also a mechanical engineer, two kids... it was kinda uncanny.

04/20/2006 10:58:25 AM · #13

Originally posted by eschelar:

As mentioned in another thread, that's some amazing stuff! WOW!

Not just the image of course...

I don't suppose PTAssembler or Hugin are free? ;)

Hugin is open source and FREE, and is available for all platforms. I use the Mac version, it is nice.

//hugin.sourceforge.net/

-Chad

04/20/2006 11:59:14 AM · #14

Originally posted by cpurser:

Beautiful.

But you really should check out PTAssembler or Hugin to stitch panos. It is SOOO much easier in the end, and it does an awesome job.

-Chad

When looking to checkout PTAssembler I stumbled on Autostitch from the University of British Columbia. That is a windows only, .jpg freebie application.

Thought I would try out their "demo" version. Their sample with 7 images merged pretty easily and I could not even figure out how to merge it at all in CS2's Photomerge.

The strength of Autostitch is its ability blend. It does a fantastic job with that. It was easily able to create a small low res version of my panoroma that blended perfect with Autostitch but was distorted.

I can't seem to get it to do a full sized, undistorted version, though.

Need to experiment more.

04/20/2006 05:55:57 PM · #15

Originally posted by cpurser:

OK... I'm picking on you. I tried out Hugin... Fess up... how is this so much easier? I need proof.

I will give it credit for blending beautifully and for merging images pretty good, better than Photmerge but not perfect. Those are huge, huge pluses.

Now for the down side. It comes out with rotated, curved output. It does not build a "flat", normal picture, or I can't figure out how to do it. It is not even close to being level. Even the size of the output image does not make a lot os sense to me. It may not be any easier correcting that after the fact than is the blending and merge errors in Photomerge. There may be ways to fix thos things but it is not immediately apparent.

There are a lot of things I don't like. For example, you can't rotate your images horizontal in the software, they must be rotated and saved before you bring them in. You can't see what the merged result will look like before you make a completed file. If the merge points are not correctly set, and how are you supposed to know that?, you will not know until the whole job is completed and you open and review the merged image in your editor and it is distorted. It produces a ton of .tiff work files that it does not delete at the end. It has tons of obscure settings that I have no idea how change for better results. The building and merging process is very slow, so you can't easily try different settings quickly to figure out how to do it right.

Photomerge may do a poorer job of blending and merging, but it has very few settings, and is highly visual for easy image merge adjustmments, it allows you to see the image before saving it and you can simply drag images around to try to get a better merge. And it produces a FLAT output. If it just blended better it would be perfect.