[Courses][gimp] Lesson 10: Stitching Panoramic Images

Akkana Peck akkana at shallowsky.com
Tue Apr 5 03:19:25 EST 2005


Carolyn Bucholtz writes:
> but I confess I've given up. I'd line up the centres ok, but there
> was a bit of rotation correction to do, but it was too much and just
> blurred the picture. Some shots would have needed a little zoom
> either bigger or smaller to get them to line up properly also. 

Bummer!  I find that if many shots need rotation, it gets really
hard.  If some of them are zoomed, that would be much worse; you'd
probably have to use the "measure" tool (looks like a compass, the
kind for for drawing circles) to measure sizes, then calculate how
much to scale.  That would be a lot of extra work, though!

> Although I haven't anything to show for this lesson, I've learnt a
> lot. A tripod would make the job much easier!! I'm going on a short
> holiday to a place called Port Stephens north of Sydney next month, a
> good place for practising taking a series of photos for an panoramic

Definitely!  Or maybe even putting the camera on a ledge or fence.
I've been on vacation this week, and shot a lot of panoramas (which
I haven't stitched yet); in several cases there was a fence railing
handy to rest the camera on, or a rock, and I'm looking forward to
seeing how much that helps.

Don't worry about not having anything for the homework.  Panoramas
do take a lot of work, and it's so much easier if you have a good
set of images to start with.  I hope everyone tries it like you did,
just to see how the techniques work, even if you don't come up with
anything right now.  Now you'll know the tricks when you go on your
trip next month.

One other point that might be worth mentioning, for people still
thinking about subjects they might want to shoot for panoramas:
sometimes you see panoramic shots of nearby buildings, like the
inside of a cathedral, or a town square where you're surrounded by
lots of interesting buildings.  Those are quite a bit harder to do
than natural landscapes, because buildings have lots of parallel and
right-angle lines, and because of the lens warp from the camera
lens, the parallel lines don't line up properly from one shot to the
next.  (Some architectural photographers use special lenses that
eliminate the warp and make parallel lines parallel; I'm sure there
are plugins which can do this digitally as well.) Distant buildings,
like a harbor shot, usually don't have this problem because the
buildings aren't so tall; it's just when you're inside or surrounded
by tall objects with parallel lines that it's a problem.

	...Akkana


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