Tue, May 24th, 2005 by James Coglan
This is something I mentioned to a few people at the London
Photobloggers meet-up a couple of weeks ago. We were talking about photo stitching software and I mentioned
a few pieces of software that do a great job of making 360-degree QuickTime panoramas.
The first thing you're going to need is PanoTools - I downloaded the version found
href="http://www.ptgui.com/download.html">here
option: 'Download and install Panorama Tools (version 2.7.0.9/nh1)'. I don't use this software explicitly but
the other software I use needs bits of PanoTools to function.
Next, get yourself a copy of the Photoshop plug-in PTLens. This
corrects barrel and pincushion distortion from a wide range of lenses, and you should correct all your images
before trying to stitch them together. This is a really useful tool, I use it on most of my wideangle shots anyway, regardless of whether I'm stitching them.
Once that's done, I use a free tool called
href="http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html">AutoStitch
giant image. This software is fully automated: you just give your images and it works out how they all fit
together. You'd be surprised by just how good a job it does, especially for an automated stitcher.
The final stage is to turn this image into a QuickTime movie, which I do using
href="http://www.panoshow.com/panocube.htm">PanoCube
aspect ratio. If your 360-degree image isn't tall enough, copy and paste it into a 2:1 image in Photoshop, and
position it with the horizon halfway up the picture. Leave black borders top and bottom where necessary.
I appreciate a lot of people using this will be Mac users, in which case you can probably use Apple's
QuickTime authoring tools for the last part.
These tools require a bit of trial and error to use properly, and I won't bore you with a step-by-step
tutorial (I don't have the time, apart from anything else!). After a few attempts you'll be pretty pleased with
the results. I've posted one of them on my site so far, and hope to do more when I have the time:
Remember: always shoot in manual exposure and white balance modes so your images are all equally exposed, it
makes the final product much smoother. If you need some inspiration, try these sites for starters:
James | jcoglan.com
May 24th, 2005 at 1:34 pm
I've often wondered how to "stitch" photographs together. Thanks for those links, I'm going to try all this out for myself - That 360-degree example on your site is absolutely fantastic - it's really an incentive, thanks for sharing
May 24th, 2005 at 1:36 pm
p.s. Have a good time at the next meet up!
May 24th, 2005 at 2:23 pm
I plugged this photographer's work here about a year ago, so apols if this feels like a repeat. But his approach to presenting his completed work is very interesting. Not a blog, but rather an interactive site: You click on hotspots within the panoramas themselves to travel deeper.
One site documents a trip to Ladakh. The other is actually a "game" built around a visit to Tibet.
http://www.peterdanford.com/ladakh/
http://tibetgame.com/
May 24th, 2005 at 3:10 pm
Wow, your examples are very impressive. I guess this sort of thing must be harder to achieve with a compact camera where you can't fix the aperture and shutter speed as you rotate and take your pics?
May 24th, 2005 at 4:48 pm
thank you James,
one crucial point you forgot to mention is that camera rotation needs to be right on the nodal point or entrance pupil of the lens: the point where when you rotate around there is no parallax. this is key for panoramic pictures and should be precise enough down to sub millimeter settings when using fisheyes.
Mac user will want to check the great mac panotools front-end from Kevin http://www.kekus.com the fortunate will prefer http://www.realviz.com
May 24th, 2005 at 5:04 pm
Before I had started my own photoblog, I was all about shooting panoramas that were made by using a Kaidan Panohead and used ArcSoft Panorama Maker to stitch the 14 images together. It was alot of fun to do, however very time consuming. Here are some examples that I still have on the web:
http://www.screenager.org/pano/index.html
May 24th, 2005 at 5:08 pm
Mickael, Bois Jacques is a stunner. Question: In street settings how do you avoid (or minimize) duplication of people as they walk through the scene. Or is it not something you concern yourself with.
May 24th, 2005 at 5:48 pm
owen: AutoStitch will adjust image brightness for you but it's not perfect. Some compact cameras do have manual modes, for example I've a Canon Powershot A80 which allows full manual settings. Also you need to try to avoid vignetting if possible - I stop the aperture down a few notches to get maximum depth of field, and this can reduce vignetting.
mickael makes a good point about how you rotate the camera - this is especially true if anything in your panorama is close to the camera, as nearby objects will suffer most from parallax errors. I try to avoid having any nearby objects in the scene, and get acceptable results without needing a tripod. mickael: I assume you use a tripod in your street scenes to make sure the people and other nearby objects come out right?
Archie: your panoramas are pretty cool, any chance you'll shoot some more for Whateverland?
May 24th, 2005 at 5:56 pm
James, although I would love to feature some panos for whateverland, my site interface is only vertically elastic (and not horizontally) so I am confined to setting the width of my images to 700 pixels.
Perhaps I can do some experiementation with some vertical panoramics
May 24th, 2005 at 7:14 pm
bois jacques was a moment of panoramic grace, some places live in you.
about replicant people, with experience you'll get the sense for what can and can't be dealt with, it all depends on your lens and your speed in action, don't shoot on a compass, shoot for your lens where the action is then stitch.
Panoramas have 2 great revelations for me in photography: a complete field of view including up an down, and a blown time lapse...
May 24th, 2005 at 7:25 pm
James,
I will use the comfort of the tripod when there is no action (nature) all other life scenes where taken handheld or with a monopod, a tripod being much too intrusive in a crowd
May 24th, 2005 at 7:25 pm
http://www.mediapiculture.net/360days/
One of my favorite 360degree type sites that inspired to me do some of my own (and has some tutorials as well).
May 24th, 2005 at 7:51 pm
"replicant people"--now that's a great term. Interesting your thoughts on embracing blown time lapses. I don't do panos but sometimes put two or three images together, eg:
http://www.jessepesta.com/gallery/archives/2005/03/entrance_1.html
Was always pleased that the three were shot rapidly in sequence. But maybe it's missing the point. If an image is successful, who cares?
May 24th, 2005 at 9:16 pm
ive got a remote reality set-up for my g5. one shot. process through software. 360 quicktime. done deal.
May 25th, 2005 at 1:27 am
I've always been intrigued with the stitching/panoramic shots...but the Canon PhotoStitch software back in the day was brutal. Thanks for posting this crash course...it has inspired me to revisit the topic. Very cool. Thanks.
May 25th, 2005 at 3:05 am
thanks james!
May 25th, 2005 at 6:51 am
hi james, see you at the next london meet for the picnic!
i do more of a 180 degree photography
I dont usually remove the lens distortions because i actually like the way it gives you something else in the picture. I dont usually use photostitch software, i just lay all the images out in photoshop and move them around on top of each other untill i have something i'm happy with.
You can acheive images with a weirdly warped 3D quality. Also i quite like that i sometimes have 'bits' of people floating around in the image, sometimes the same person more than once in different places.
heres a couple of other links that may be of interest:
http://www.panography.org/
and this guy is doing some amazing stuff:
http://www.alpinorama.com/
cheers, simon.
oh! btw on a related subject: does anyone out there have an old polaroid 110a or 110b that they want to sell to me? i want to convert it into a 6 x 12 panoramic that shoots on 120 roll film. I am having trouble picking one up here in the UK.
May 25th, 2005 at 7:18 am
Don't forget one of the best open source stitching GUIs
for panotools:
http://hugin.sourceforge.net/
That's what I use - together with autopano-SIFT:
http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~nowozin/autopano-sift
May 25th, 2005 at 7:52 am
simon - Sorry, won't be at this month's meet-up, it's the day before my finals start! I figured this might not be quite up your alley as you're more into the old-school photo montage thing. I know what you mean about the way you work, all the little imperfections can give some great effects.
May 26th, 2005 at 6:18 pm
I just tried reworking a couple of my old montages using autostitch and I have to say its a pretty awe inspiring bit of software. I really am impressed. All the other similar things I have tried have either been so limited as to be a bit useless or have a front end on them so un-user-friendly it would make even the most dedicated weep. I will post a couple of the reworked images up soon. (probably tomorrow. its been a very long day..)
cheers.
August 21st, 2005 at 6:47 am
I've used a few tools and was really looking to make panoramas in Flash rather than Java as thats what most people seem to have on their computers these days, i found a neat little 360 Flash Panorama viewer on 360dof.com website, it works pretty well.
December 3rd, 2005 at 6:25 am
You should try autopano next gen
autopano.net
old software ?
going to Trash !
March 7th, 2006 at 1:37 pm
Hi Guys, we produce virtual tours and 360 degree images using a 1 shot lens method which means there's no stitching. Examples can be found at http://www.virtualtourmanchester.co.uk
September 30th, 2006 at 8:40 am
A couple of years ago I had a look at a website showing a 360 deg pano and from this time on I've been addicted to panos. I kept on learning how to do it, got the skills and equipment. Panos are my life
Cheers,
Sven
http://www.cimx.de
November 6th, 2006 at 6:56 pm
360dof really kinda sucked I thought. windows only, crashes browsers that they claim to support, does not fully support industry standard protocols, their stitching software wont run on anything less than quad dual core xeons with 4G of memory, support was friendly but couldn't answer anything but lame canned responses, oh, and their return policy claims that you can get a refund within 30 days. I've waited 60 now. Daily emails to them come back, "oh, we're sorry, it'll be refunded in less than 48 hours.".
f-ing theives.
January 24th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
Or you could just use http://www.picturecloud.com