ToasterWaffles

Friday night I got the idea that stitching together loads of photos to make a panorama would be a blast. I was pretty sure there were a few places in Coronado that would make terrific vantage points. We ended up picking Centennial Park as a good location.

Tripod in hand we set up shop and started panning and snapping away. Having read some time back that there should be about 30% overlap to make aligning easier, I ended up taking only a few photos. Jess suggested a switch to portrait orientation to get some of the water reflections included. A portrait orientation panorama from the convention center to the USS midway using the 100mm lens required 17 photos.

By the time we got back home and I’d loaded all the photos into Photoshop’s Photostitch script, a problem appeared. The sky kept changing colors, creating awful bands across the photo where the seams were. This clearly wasn’t going to work. Reviewing the photos illuminated us to the problem: different exposure settings! I had set the camera to manual focus, natch, but had put it in Av (aperture value) mode! Thinking the lighting would be equal enough since it was a clear day, I didn’t notice when the exposure times changed: from 1/20s to 1/45s. This changed things dramatically. Since you can’t really fix that in RAW post-production we had to reformulate our plan.

Later that night we headed back out to find a clear sky between Coronado and downtown San Diego. Perfect! After tweaking the settings a bit we arrived at: 2 seconds @ f/2.8 on ISO 200. Awesome. In the LCD reviews the photos looked awesome — the camera was catching much more information than our eyes were. I made another pass with a 4 second exposure to satisfy Jess’ curiosity and then we packed up and went home.

This morning I loaded the photos again and found — the same banding. What was left? Finally it occurred to me: Auto White Balance! Since I’d absentmindedly left the camera in AWB the color tint would be different from frame to frame. Loading all the images into CS2’s RAW importer I fixed this by setting them all to ‘Tungsten’, which was pretty good. Running these through Photostitch, now corrected, revealed: more banding. 8O

After reading a few tutorials online I concluded that my photos were OK, it was Photoshop that was being a punk. A bit more research led me to DoubleTake, which had some good reviews. After some dragging, dropping, and clicking (it couldn’t figure out to auto-rotate the portrait orientation photos) I had a decent looking panorama. All I had to do was tweak some of the overlaps by widening some, shifting others, and bingo!
There are two versions available. Both have the DoubleTake watermark on them because I didn’t pay for the software yet. If I end up doing this again, I probably will. I’ll be emailing Henrik soon enough.

UPDATED: Files don’t have watermarks now, since I paid for DoubleTake.

There are two versions available: a 6248×1024 JPG [7.6 MB] and a 7322×1200 JPG [10.1 MB]. Since these are much longer than most displays, you can crop or resize as you see fit.

Here’s a small thumbnail:

Technorati Tags: photography