Friday 19 February 2010

Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda

I'm saving the good title for when I finally get the panorama I want. This isn't it but it's getting there. This was taken on Tuesday evening and hoped to learn a few things for Wednesday night but I broke the telescope so that didn't happen. The day crew went up and tried to fix what I'd broken but the winds were too high so I got to spend the night at Hale Pohaku.

OK, day crew, you made your point, you win! I won't do it again.

On Thursday evening, before sundown, I went back to the spot to try once again what I described in "Maybe this week I'll nail it". I now have about 70 pictures and thought I'd covered all bases when it came to making a panorama in difficult and changing light conditions, but no luck so far. The software (Hugin) either deals with the light and gives crazy and disjointed looking pictures or gives a great panorama that looks as though someone screwed up their jigsaw puzzle.

I promise to get it right one day. Next time I'll turn off the automatic colour-temperature setting in my camera because I think that's what got me on Thursday night.

All - thanks for your comments in recent posts, I'll respond to them over the weekend once I get over mountain lag.

5 comments:

JestrBob said...

Not bad Tom. Hugin is a program I was never happy with the outcome. IT takes just a little longer to hand trim and match the edges with GIMP but for the cost it does work well. it just take real patience to get it right.

And I would turn off the auto white balance. Or at least work with the RAW image and hand set the color temperature.

I can see some vast improvements.

JestrBob said...

Here is a person that uses a different set of software. I have never used it myself but you can see her results.

http://ecarmel.typepad.com/elizabeth_carmels_photogr/2010/02/new-panorama-tools-free-pass-to-pma-2010-.html

Tom said...

Bob - thanks for the link. I really am getting fed up with Hugin. It's powerful but I'm really testing its limits now. Still, I don't have the money right now for the software in that link - well over $100 - I have other things that money could be used for!

Thanks for the link though - wonderful pictures on that site.

Tom

JestrBob said...

I found some real limitations using Hugin. I did find using GIMP and trimming off about 1/8 or so from the image edge I could get away from the small amount of edge distortion. YMMV depending on the lens in use.

Good luck and Keep watching you blog. The next time I get more than one day in Hilo or Kona, I let you know.

Anonymous said...

Tom, You've got some great pics both here and on your Flickr accts so I'm a little surprised you're having trouble with panos. It's not clear to me what your in-camera procedure is but I'd strongly recommend shooting all images at full manual with the same exposure settings, and camera raw, if you're not doing so already. It makes blending in the pano stage so much easier and accurate. And as for software the only program I'd recommend is PTGui (http://www.ptgui.com/). It's far superior to GIMP, Hugin, or even PS CS4 Extended imo.

Good luck!
Dave (Kailua-Kona)