Quote:
Originally Posted by philly
Bob, what softwae are you using for this stuff. It's fantastic. Congratulations!  |
Hey dude.
Theres several different applications you can use, so i'll just explain what works for me. Theres no single program to do it, but a combination.
First:
Take the photos!
How you take the pics will depend on what lens you're using. My first pano was done with a Canon EOS 20D and a Canon 10-22mm EF-S lens at 10mm (16mm fullframe equivalent). This required 28 seperate photos to get the full 360 around with 30-40% overlap in images to allow stitching.
My new ones i do Sigma 8mm Fisheye lens, means I can do it in 6 or 8 shots. You also need to pivot the camera properly, you need to pivot around the nodal point of the lens, to get rid of parralax errors in the images. The nodal point is the point in the lens where the light crosses over and inverts, kinda hard to explain.
Second:
i run the pics through photoshop a bit to clean them up, fix any errors, run some unsharp mask over it, noise reduction etc. Then stitch the photos. For this i use panorama tools which unfortunately isn't free.
This is time consuming, and is really a try it and see type thing. Basically you import the images, and then set control points to link photos, so the software knows which pics to stitch where. It does take some playing to get a final image. From this, you get a equirectangular image, which looks way out, but works properly if mapped to the inside of a sphere.
Three:
Turn the image into a quicktime image. For this I use an app called Pano2QTVR which is free for non-commercial use from here.
And voila, a panorama.
The first one i did took me about 12-14 hours, but i've gotten better and can do them in 1-3 hours now, depending on how much photoshopping is needed.