North Cascades National Park

[d0ne]

A panorama view from the Sahale Arm. Stitched from 5-6 shots. What do you guys think (composition, image quality, etc.)? I'm having trouble keeping the foreground's contrasty colors and ridding of the blue color cast on the far away mountains and the uneven blue sky due to the stitching. I'm at a point where I take pictures, edit them, and start wondering what and how else can I do to make the pictures look better. No clue :). Any comments or pointers would be greatly appreciated. You can play with the picture and let us see your result.



This is a view at the Reintalanger Hut on our route to the top of Zugspitze in Germany. Just want to hear what your comments on this are. I like the picture, but it's not as great as I hope it'd be when I took it.

[GonzoBernelli]

I suggest you look into HDR panoramas. It will belp a lot in drilling through haze and bringing up detail in shadowed areas. These are [previously unposed] detail shots from my Colorado Overlook thread

Shadow detail recovery
Before


After


Detail from haze
Before


After


Before


After


These 2 books helped me a lot

Amazon.com: The HDRI Handbook: High Dynamic Range Imaging for Photographers and CG Artists +DVD (9781933952055): Christian Bloch: Books

Amazon.com: Photographic Multishot Techniques: High Dynamic Range, Super-Resolution, Extended Depth of Field, Stitching (9781933952383): Rainer Gulbins: Books

Hope this helps you. You should also think about a purpose-built Pano head if not already in your kit.

[d0ne]

Thanks for the tips Nick! When you use HDR with your pano pictures, did you stitch the different exposures first and THEN do HDR or do the HDR for each shot and then stitch the pano?

[GonzoBernelli]

I just selected the 84 RAW files and dropped them onto the desktop icon of PTGui. It examined the information in the EXIF to get the exposures, but the 84 images were in the order shot.

[venchka]

If you are PC based and want to learn with some very good FREE software, download Microsoft ICE. It blends exposures and stitches on the fly. Rotating motion and cylidrical verticle projection work best for most of what I've done so far. Adjust the horizon in the preview to make the ends parallel and verticle and go. My largest image to date is 5 segments and the TIFF file is 238Mb. If you have all the correct matching operating components and correct Codec file installed, ICE will read RAW files. That is the best way to go in my opinion. You don't even have to worry about selecting the right images. If an image doesn't fit, ICE ignores it. A very powerful tool. AND it's FREE! That makes it perfect software in my book.

[d0ne]

Thanks Nick and Wayne. I will give MS ICE a try. FREE + good = great :)