Panorama Photo

Not a simple motif! Much better than your first try ... Cheers Hans-Jörg

Good sharpness, well stitched, only some transitions in the sky are still visible. Up to now we have only about 30 panoramas from the Netherlands, so there should be a lot of space left to explore...

Good to see you active here - very nice view. I agree with Jens on all points - maybe the Hugin experts can give some advice on how to avoid the transitions. At f/10 it shouldn't be vignetting (onless the G1XMkii experts tell otherwise...) Cheers, Martin

Thx for the comments, I very much appreciate. Now I have 2 Q's for the specialists here:
1.The original height was 1842px, so I cut off some of the sky and the bottom resulting in a height of about 1200 px. Then I reduced this to the max allowed here (500px) with the Hugin program. Of course this reduction means a significant loss of sharpness as is obvious by the crenelated appearance of the balustrade at left. Now I have seen that many pano's here do not show this crenelated appearance. How this is obtained as I suppose that everyone has to respect the 500 pixel height?
2. Concerning the transitions still visible in the sky, as Jens mentioned, how can this be avoided or smoothed out as every pic here has the same properties? Is this a lense effect or so?

Hello Mentor. First, you need to be more precise as to what kind of pictures you make. JPG/RAW? Manuel setting or automatic? I could be wrong, but my guess from your data is, that you have made the pictures as JPGs in manuel setting. I would guess further, that (if I am right) the camera makes a slight exposure optimizing for every picture (in spite of the manuel setting), and that is what you see in the pano. If at all possible, use RAW's and Canons own Digital Photo Professional program (should come along with the camera, or should be available as a free download with the serialnumber), or Lightroom or RAW-therapee. Then, this could be a workflow:

Take the pics in largest format possible, as RAWs. Use only manuel setting of time, aperture and iso, and do not change during the shooting. Whitebalance and style can be changed in the RAW processing, so that is not important during shooting. App 1/3 overlap in each side.

At home, make a library for every round of panos. Make a proces in DPP for all the pictures at the same time (Select all). Click on the tool palette. On the 3rd rider (NR/ALO), click off ALO. Correct the brightness, choose style and whitebalance (still for all at the same time). Perhaps, but not necessary) add less than half of the possible sharpness. In batch proces, I choose exit-TIFF 8 bit. Make a new folder for the TIF's.

In Hugin, open the folder with the TIF's. Try the automatic alignment. When not quite right - and that happens often, go in the controlpoint rider, and remove the points closest to the photographer. If there is only water in the horizon, you can ad so-called horizontal controlpoints - and they don't need to overlap. For a start, use the left-most, paired with a picture from the center, and then the rightmost paired with a picture from the center. Then the leftmost paired with the rightmost. When it looks ok, create the pano as a TIF, press optimum size.

If all goes well, you have a large tif pano. Any adjustment should be done now, after creating the pano, in GIMP or photoshop or paint. When done, I prefer downscaling to 500 px and sharpening in Irfanview (free). Remember only to sharp AFTER the downscaling, and only when processing RAW at the beginning and as the last thing after downscaling. Some also use severel downscalings, but with no sharpening in between. LG Jan.

Thx Jan for the detailed explanation. I took the pics in Av mode, JPG superfine, manual focus with safety MF off. My first pano was taken in full auto mode which clearly was the wrong way to do.
You said to take the pics in manual mode but what do you do in a 360° pano when the light circumstances drastically change when you turn to the sun? Do you adapt the manual settings when turning around? This pano is a 180° with the sun straight from behind, so I thought the Av mode was the best option because the shutter speed could adapt (but curiously it remained at 1/320 s for the 12 pics). So why the slight differences in the blue sky is something of a question mark.
I am not yet at the point to shoot in RAW because of the very big format and how to handle these heavy pics.
In Hugin I made the pano in TIFF format and on my Imac this looks beautiful but for this site I used the JPEG setting to reduce the file size and with an additional downsizing of the height to 500.
But to smooth the crenelated appearance, I understand I should do an extra sharpening with Irfanview?

Nevertheless and aside from this technical discussion I'm very delighted about this picture. KR Arno

Hi again. When shooting with the sun in your back, it is very likely the same values for all the pics. However, in spite of even strictly manuel setting, almost all cameras have an automatic optimizer that will do its own, subtle alterations, such as brightning up darker parts or expanding the dynamic range of the picture. You can only avoid that by shooting RAW. You wouldn't notice in the single pictures, only when stitching the whole batch you can see the slight differences. And normally, it only becomes visible in a clear blue sky. If you had clods in the pano, perhaps we wouldn't notice.

The TIF format means, that you save all informations from the previous format, but when you start with JPG, you loose a lot from the beginning. However, it is fully possible to make good panos in JPG, but can't really change a lot, which you could with RAW. Therefore, it is not a good idea to reduce the filesize in the middle of the workflow. Small differences will be even more visible then. Therefore fullsize pics in the stitcher, and take out a full size pano, then eventual changes on the full size pano, and only then, after reducing to 500 px, do the sharpening.

When shooting a 360 degree, you should try to make a picture of the brightest part of the horizon and make sure it is not overlit. Then you shoot a round, throw them in the pano, and only then you can bright up the pano if necessary. With some experience you can start to play around with seperate shots of the sun part, but like I say, that requires some experience - and I don't have that in that respect. LG Jan.

Thx Jan, this was very helpful indeed. Now I compared this stripped down JPEG version with the big TIFF version and it is very clear that the small differences in the sky are accentuated in the first. They are much less visible (almost unnoticeable) in the TIFF version even when this is a composition of original JPEG superfine pics.

Maybe we should ask Thomas Schabacher to increase (at least double) the allowed file size and height, which would do already a small wonder to quality and without the need for much stripping down and extra sharpening?

I'm glad you have begun to put panos. In my opinion, this is your best.