Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/12/08
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At 10:43 PM +0300 12/7/02, Bee Flowers wrote:
>Henning, the mail I sent you came back "undeliverable", so I'll post it
>instead.
hmmmm..... strange.
>Thank you for your kind comments. To answer your question re "how
>it's done", allow me to quote myself from another forum where a
>similar question was put to me. Here goes:
>
>Those cubic (all around) panos have quite a learning curve, and I
>certainly claim no expert status, since some other people's QTVRs
>look a lot better than mine. But I'll be glad to share what little I
>know.
>
>
>To get truly good quality, you would have to use a moderate wide
>angle lens and stitch scores of pictures to make a cubic qtvr. The
>use of a tripod is also essential to obtain the best possible
>quality. I have neither time nor patience to stitch tens of pictures
>for each pano, and in the case of my subway project, I also did not
>have the opportunity to use a tripod, for you'd have to be suicidal
>to set one up in the Moscow metro.
>
>
>This then limited my options to handholding a camera with a
>non-equirectilinear fisheye lens. That's the sort that makes a
>circular image. I use a Nikon CP5000 with fisheye extender (I do
>have Leica cameras, which are the very finest of course, just like
>Leica people are the very finest netizens, but.... well... ). I set
>the camera to bracket 3 exposures at plus/minus a whole stop. You
>must make sure that you don't move the camera while shooting off
>those frames for you'll need to superimpose them later on in
>Photoshop. After the first bracketed image, I turn 90 degrees, while
>taking a little step back so as to rotate around the lens' nodal
>point, not my own axis. This way I shoot in four directions (three
>would be enough, but I find it easier to 'guess' 90 degs than 120
>with little margin left for error).
>
>
>In Photoshop, I take the brightest image as default, and copy/paste
>it onto a darker one, in order to erase through the brightest (now
>top) image with the (soft) eraser tool at 35%. This to fill in the
>burned out highlights.
>
>
>When that's done, I use the (soft) dodge tool set to "medium/20%"
>with a radius of 300 and run it across the edges of the (round)
>image. This to get rid of the slight vignetting that fisheye lenses
>have. The result I save with a simple title, such as "one", "two"
>etc.
>
>
>The stitching is then done with Panotools. This is a truly unusable
>piece of software, unless you're a dyed-in-the-wool mathematician
>and programmer. People more like myself revert to the front end for
>Panotools, PTGUI (google for both!). Btw, this software will not
>stitch fisheye images unless you browse the internet for a
>'restored' version of Panotools (some litigious company is giving
>the entire pano community a hard time, that's why). After you set a
>bundle of parameters and control points, your four (or three) images
>are stitched together. You should choose "photoshop with masks" as
>output option, because there's considerable work to be done in
>Photoshop to make the parts blend into each other nicely (in terms
>of brightness and contrast, that is). Out of Photoshop, you should
>save a flat file to a format of your preference.
>
>
>But then: since I'm unhappy with how the the viewer that comes with
>Panotools shows large files (small ones work fine, but the big ones
>get really very shaky and slow), I use Panoweaver to convert the
>Photoshop file into a Quicktime VR. (Panoweaver is meant to make
>qtvr's out of two fisheye pics, but that just doesn't work: as a
>conversion program is a nice little thing, though). There are some
>other programs which can do this task just as well, though.
>
>
>I can't quite recall, but it must have taken me weeks of fairly
>dedicated work to get decent results. Unless you're well versed in
>similar things already, there's a tremendous number of things that
>you'll need to learn; it's been a bumpy road for me. Having finally
>gotten the hang of it, I can now do one qtvr in under two hours at
>the computer.
>
>Note that making a 360 degree panorama that does not need to be
>capable of functioning as a *cubic*, aka '360x180', QTVR is very
>very easy; with any of the multitude of available software packages
>it can be done in minutes. It's when you want your VR to have
>"straight up" and "straight down" capacity, that you're in trouble.
>
>Bee
I've played a bit with panotools, but haven't yet been dedicated
enough to really get into it. Unfriendly is just the start. I was
hoping you might have developed a more direct and robust method.
Thanks very much for the info.
If IPIX ever gets slapped down legally, I think there would be some
incentive for other people to work on software tools to smooth the
process, but until then I guess that there won't be much activity.
As others have mentioned, the artistic elements of your subjects are
what makes the pictures, but I find them extremely fascinating in any
case. Thanks for posting them.
- --
* Henning J. Wulff
/|\ Wulff Photography & Design
/###\ mailto:henningw@archiphoto.com
|[ ]| http://www.archiphoto.com
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