how do you make panoramas, edit pictures together...?

Hi Takuya. It depends how you go about making the individual photographs – whether you’re simply hand-holding, or using a tripod with panoramic head. I’m using a Manfrotto head which keeps the nodal point of the lens centered over the tripod, then I make three vertical shots which overlap each other by about 25%. Then I put them in a programm called ptMac (for Macintosh), which costs$49 – try a Google search. Once you’ve set your head properly, you won’t get any distorsion and the images should fit together with no seams – use the ‘enbland’ option and save as tiff with layers to make any final adjustments. If you tell the program what angle you shot at (looking up or down) then it will also correct converging verticals. I use mine with a D2X to get higher res images when needed. It works very well.

If you’re hand-holding the camera, then I have no idea. I’ve seen some programmes for PC which seem to throw things together pretty well but I couldn’t tell you anything about them.

All the best, Colin.

There is free software with every canon digital camera called Photo Stitch, it comes both PC and Mac version and it works pretty good even with hand-held shots. Just remember- for best results you need to use “manual” mode.

Hi Takuya



I am possibly having a gallery show soon & I want to do something simillar as well. How many pictures are you stiching together? I want to stich 6 or maybe more 35mm frames together to make 1 long panorama something like a "Bayeux Tapestry" Let me know how you get on as I would like some info. Incidently I shot all the frames on film without a tripod & looking at the contact sheets I know I may have problems making the shots join perfectly but I reckon it might look OK if it’s slighlty mis-aligned.



Good Luck



Mark

Taku!!! use photoshop mate, CS and CS2 have Photomerge in File>Automate>Photomerge. Make sure you dont let it flatten the layers and then you can still tweek the images by rebrushing the masks yourself. Slightly different but I used a similar tecnique to do this, (shot on a monopod)
banner.jpg

cool shot nathan, looks like a long-exposure-with-my-how-do-I-programme-this-Metz-strobe-effect-thing shot!

s

Nathan 

I presume we are talking about the image of the dancer in your gallery….If so I am equally impressed. How large is the original? I want to make a panorama approx 5 metres long & 1 metre high. I would love some tips! 



Mark

Mark,

The image is composed from 14 or so different frames shot on the ID Mark II at full speed, jpg large. The actual original file size was well over 420MB after all the images were stiched togeather. If I had of shot in RAW, or even better film, then you could easily make an image in the dimentions you are talking about. Here is a crop of the image bannerCrop.jpg or you can see the original files here




If you are willing to put a little bit of time into the image and can go without any automated assistance I recomend learning all about layer masks in photoshop. I used a wacom tablet and layer masks to peice this image togeather by brushing out the overlaying areas I didnt want in the picture. In all it took about 1 hour to do. Id be happy to answer any questions you have, drop me an email if you like.