Helicon focus back to lightroom dng trial#

That can help when clouds are racing by due to high wind speeds (I shoot in the opposite direction of cloud travel, to avoid repeating ghosts anyway, so sometimes left-to-right, sometimes right-to-left). It also allows faster shooting without having to look through the viewfinder. I also use the 300N Panoramic Rotation Unit, because the indexed stops allow me to get consistent overlaps, and I now rarely skip a shot in large stitching projects by getting distracted with many shots per row. PTGUI uses excellent resampling algorithms that preserve lots of detail despite the warping that takes place. Saving the project file (and the tiles, or the Raw converter parameters) will allow recreating a new stitch at a different size (even from a somewhat different angle). Once keystoning is minimized, it can help to deliberately add back a little keystoning by dialing a small amount of pitch, especially on shots from a relatively short distance (that get stretched vertically a lot). Horizontal control points only make sense when shooting exactly perpendicular to the front of the facade. Leveling can be a part of the stitching process and can be helped by manually adding vertical control points (that are often available with architecture). horizontal leveling does help because it results in less cropping / content aware filling), so there's a lot of time saving and no requirement for high quality (electronic) levels (which also need calibration). Meticulous leveling on tripod is not necessary anymore (approx. So to summarize single row stitching requires alignment of the entrance pupil with 2 axes (horizontal shift and fore/aft shift aligns the vertical axis of rotation), and multirow stitching requires alignment of 3 axes, to keep the intersection of 3 axes aligned with the center of the entrance pupil. That will add some complexity to the setup.

Multi-Row: If one also wants to tilt the lens axis up/down, then that rotation also needs centering on the axis through the entrance pupil, by vertical shifting on a bar.

This then also allows using a vertically shifted lens and only horizontal panning. That works if the lens is already aligned with the horizontal tripod/rotating head offset.

Single Row: Requires a minimum of gear, usually only a bar that allows shifting the camera/lens forward or aft, to align the vertical axis through which one rotates with the entrance pupil of the lens.

Single Row: If the optical axis of the lens does not align with the horizontal center of rotation, one will first need a horizontal bar for shifting the optical axis into alignment such that it intersects with that rotation center.

One can use gear to optimize the setup for either single row, or multi-row stitches. The more depth there is in the image, the more critical alignment becomes.

For facades with little detail in the foreground (street furniture, trees/(lamp)posts/etc.), alignment to keep the entrance pupil stationary is less critical.

The most benefit of keeping the entrance pupil in a stationary position comes from total freedom when adding tiles to expand the FoV. Any better video you can point me to? (I had also shot a portrait-format six-shot panorama of the same building and I suspect that this would have benefited from keeping the lens in the right position.)įor what I do, using PTGUI would be a lot cheaper than hiring (or buying) a 24mm T/S, which I do occasionally. I watched the PTGUI demos and I cannot get my head around the positioning of the lens and the use of that tripod rail gadget to keep it in the same position. Is this what others would do? There is no option to create a RAW format panorama correct?Ģ. In order to have as little as possible to do in CS6 after creating the panorama, I processed the files in C1 and then saved them as TIFFs.ġ.

Helicon focus back to lightroom dng trial#

However, I just downloaded the PTGUI trial (thanks Bart!) and processed a three shot, landscape-format, panorama (where I had shifted the 45mm up a bit to take in the top of the building and some sky, and lose some of the lower foreground and then panned three exposures) and the result is flawless. In the end, having tried CS6, I used a single shot from the wide lens and just corrected the verticals. On a shoot at the weekend I had shot a few horizontal and vertical panoramas using the 45mm T/S, as well a shooting the same building with a wide lens tilted up, just to cover myself.