Grampian Mountain Panorama

[gmitchel]

I was searching through old foldedrs with Lightroom and notice six photos were shot as a landscape years ago. I took the shots hand-held from a lookout in the Grampian Mountains of Scotland, en route to the Linn of Dee.

I've heard lots of complaints about Photoshop CS4, Auto-Align Layers, and Aut-Blend Layers.

You decide . . .

This was assembled from six shots. No tripod. Panning from my waist. Canon D60 camera. The entire panorama was done in Photoshop CS4.

Print size is 6 inches by 30 inches.

Here's as close to Web-size as I can get and still do justice to all of the detail.

http://www.thelightsright.com/files/...anPanorama.jpg

If you're interested in how I did this, here's the walk-through:

http://www.thelightsright.com/Grampi...amaWalkthrough

Enjoy!

Comments will be most welcome!

Mitch

[Frank Lopes]

Mitch,

you did a great job specially considering it was done hand held.

I'm one of the few members in retouchpro.com shooting panos and I would love to see more people involved in this type of photography.

Would you mind filling some of the technical details?
You mentioned the camera, but what did you use for a lens?
What about speed and f/stop?

In your blog you mentioned "Panoramas tend to have considerable variation in exposure"...

Do you happen to remember if you shot the images in manual mode or auto exposure mode?

Originally Posted by gmitchel

...panorama...

[gmitchel]

I made a mistake. Foggy memory.

These were Canon D30 images, not Canon D60 images. I took them in 2002.

The shots were f/5.6, 1/500th of a second, Canon EF 20-35mm lens (set to 35mm), which makes them 56mm equivalent, aperture priority.

I'm pleased you like the panorama!

Cheers,

MItch

[ronbud75]

This is truly a great job. I took some hand held pano's at Gettysburg Battlefields this past summer and have tried to stitch them together in Elements and am not totally happy with the results I achieved (exposure blending, mainly). Is this a result of Element's limitations? I'm using 4.0 for Mac and I think there is a more recent one for Mac. Ponying up the cash for the full CS4 is a little daunting, when I could maybe just upgrade to the newer Elements.

Any advice would be appreciated,

Thanks, Ron

[Liz]

Impressive view. I'm not a photographer just an appreciator of great visual stuff. Absolutely drawn to panoramoras. And know how very difficult it is to match up the pixels. Have done it for customers. Fabulous job. Love it.

[Frank Lopes]

From my limited experience, I've found that most of the problems that you mentioned were my fault and not the software that I used.

To mitigate some of those problems I stick to these very simple principles:

1. With the camera on auto, point the camera to the brightest area that you will be shooting and note what the camera recommends for speed and f/stop
2. Set the camera to manual mode and use the settings the camera recommended when it was in auto
3. Set the white balance to what is appropriate: indoor, cloudy, sunny etc
4. Set the camera as level and as steady as you can make it. Ideally, use a tripod but you don't have to.
5. Starting from your left, start shooting the individual photos making sure you overlap each image by around 30%.
6. Import into your favorite software package and stitch away.

Regarding the need to buy Photoshop to do panos, I think it is overkill. I don't think it justifies the price if what you looking for is a pano stitching solution. There are other solutions out there that do a better job, are faster and cost much less.

For more tips on the subject, read this blog

Good luck!

Originally Posted by ronbud75

This is truly a great job. I took some hand held pano's at Gettysburg Battlefields this past summer and have tried to stitch them together in Elements and am not totally happy with the results I achieved (exposure blending, mainly). Is this a result of Element's limitations? I'm using 4.0 for Mac and I think there is a more recent one for Mac. Ponying up the cash for the full CS4 is a little daunting, when I could maybe just upgrade to the newer Elements.

Any advice would be appreciated,

Thanks, Ron

[Kraellin]

mitch,

very nice panorama!

and frank, i've done some pano's, but i do mine within the camera itself, not with an external program. my little kodak z885 stiches them within itself. as i take one shot, the camera pre-processes that shot and then gives me a little thumb image to line up the next shot. i take that and it then gives me a new thumb to line up the next one. makes it almost foolproof and does a great job of stiching. once all three shots are taken it then goes ahead and processes the whole into one image. really quite slick.

i've not done a lot of these, but i think i did post one of the flower ones, a whole field of yellow flowers in panorama.