Pano Question for Jeff Kohn

[josphy]

There's also great software out there that is freeware -- Hugin and Enblend are what I have used. They are not as polished in terms of the user interface as some of the other programs, but they are very powerful programs and best of all they're free.

[mjdmike]

Larry, thanks for asking the questions -- and Jeff, thanks for the generous response.

You're right Jeff, this is what makes this forum so great, all the nice people within.

[xseption]

Jeff:

If you would be interested in taking a few of us on one of your trips, we could probably pay for your expenses as a way of thanking you or perhaps charge a fee which many of us would gladly pay.

Would anyone be interested in going with Jeff under those conditions?

~ edd

[larrys]

I love that idea of paying Jeff's way for us. Hope his taste in wine is no where near his taste in camera equipment. Might get a little steep!!!!

I have three trips already planned this year to the mountains but there could possibly be a fall foliage tour if I have enough vacation left. Great idea that I would like to see happen this year or next year.

[jeffkohn]

Originally Posted by engstrom

One other thing that I found in my limited time doing panos - overlap more than you think. I found 25% - 33% overlap in images gives me enough overlap to blend together the images very well.

That's a good point that I completely forgot to mention. I usaually use about 25% overlap. And if I'm shooting with a wideangle lens I'll overlap even more because the extra overlap helps minimize the "warping" that the stitching software sometimes has to perform in order to correct for distortion at the frame edges.

[venchka]

Suppose, instead of panning the camera around a fixed point, you move the camera in a straight line while maintaining sufficent overlap. I'm considering moving the camera in both vertical and horizontal axis. Can the stiching software handle that?

[jeffkohn]

Originally Posted by venchka

Suppose, instead of panning the camera around a fixed point, you move the camera in a straight line while maintaining sufficent overlap. I'm considering moving the camera in both vertical and horizontal axis. Can the stiching software handle that?

With software like Autopano Pro you could use the "linear" projection and you might get pretty good results, but they won't be optimal because the software assumes the camera was rotated. The developer of Autopano Pro does plan to add support for orthogonal stitching in a future release, which is what you are talking about. There may be other software out there that already supports it, I don't really know. If not you may get the best results by just manually combining the images.

Here's an article from the AutoPano wiki that describes the currently supported projection modes and how they work.

[venchka]

Thanks, Jeff. Looks like I will have to wait for the software to catch up with my idea.