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View Full Version : Pano try: SF Skyline from Treasure Island

TripleBlack
06-17-2012, 1:46am
So I haven't done much with panos but had a chance to take this a couple weeks back. I got one of the shots off quite a bit which resulted in fairly sever crop.

I merged the shots in Gimp as I don't have Photoshop. What software does everyone use to do panoramas?

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v609/TripleBlackxTwo/SFPanofromTreasureIsland.jpg
78SA
06-17-2012, 6:10am
My new camera has panorama mode but I haven't tried it yet.
Grey Ghost
06-17-2012, 7:39am
I don't have PS either...never tried a pano. Awhile back you could buy Paint Shop Pro v.14 for $40 and get a $40 refund. I proceeded with that, but it would not run on my 15 yr. old PC :lol:Do you shoot Canon or Nikon ? Canon has the newest ver. of DPP available for free. I'll have to check if it stitches together for a pano.
Giraffe (He/Him)
06-17-2012, 8:35am
What software does everyone use to do panoramas?

I don't do those. They are kinda cool however.
TripleBlack
06-17-2012, 11:28am
I don't have PS either...never tried a pano. Awhile back you could buy Paint Shop Pro v.14 for $40 and get a $40 refund. I proceeded with that, but it would not run on my 15 yr. old PC :lol:Do you shoot Canon or Nikon ? Canon has the newest ver. of DPP available for free. I'll have to check if it stitches together for a pano.

I shoot Canon and I have DPP but have never used it. I think they may have a utility that ships with DPP that does panos and there are a few free packages out there but the only one I tried, Hugin, wasn't very intuitive. I ended up using a Gimp extension called Pandora which worked with some fiddling.

I've used Gimp for a long time since it's free, pretty well supported, and has most of the capability of PS that I need.

Since getting Lightroom about a year ago, I haven't used much else for post except when doing HDR. On this one, I used it to do lens correction, noise reduction, and color temp on the RAWs before processing them as HDRs. Then Gimp to stitch them and back to LR for final noise reduction.

Getting the exposures to match from shot to shot was the difficult part and this one still has problems there. Got a case of "give up" after two or three tries at it.
Giraffe (He/Him)
06-17-2012, 11:40am
Getting the exposures to match from shot to shot
Shoot in manual. Problem solved.
TripleBlack
06-17-2012, 11:59am
Shoot in manual. Problem solved.

:seasix: Excellent suggestion and I will try that the next chance I get. I get my best results with manual when doing ND/GND filter shots and it makes even more sense on a pano. :seasix:
Grey Ghost
06-17-2012, 8:02pm
A bit off topic. But the latest ver. of DPP (3.11) has a 'lens' tab in the tool palette. I've seen some examples online that if the lens is 'soft' (like in the corners) it makes a HUGE improvement/fix for those problems. It doesn't work with my 20d though...30D on up.

Any recommended plugins for GIMP ? I still don't understand how to use layers.
TripleBlack
06-17-2012, 10:03pm
A bit off topic. But the latest ver. of DPP (3.11) has a 'lens' tab in the tool palette. I've seen some examples online that if the lens is 'soft' (like in the corners) it makes a HUGE improvement/fix for those problems. It doesn't work with my 20d though...30D on up.

Any recommended plugins for GIMP ? I still don't understand how to use layers.

Lightroom also does lens correction for distortion and chromatic aberration; it helps a lot when using wide angles and though I had not thought about it, I'm sure it helps with panos too.

Re: Gimp plugins. The one I used for the pano is called Pandora. You'll have to master layers before you can use it though. Another plugin I've used quite a bit is G'MIC, which is a collection of several other popular plugins.

There are lots of good Gimp tutorials on YouTube and I would advise anyone wanting to use it to poke around there. You just have to get comfortable with layers to do much in Gimp, or PS for that matter.
syf350
06-18-2012, 10:23am
will gimp do HDR?
TripleBlack
06-18-2012, 11:58am
will gimp do HDR?

There are some HDR plugins for Gimp, but I think most of them are designed to emulate the look of over the top HDR images.

Here's a page with some open source (or free at least) options for HDR.

Best Free High Dynamic Range (HDR) Software (http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-high-dynamic-range-hdr-software.htm)