I am starting this topic so I won't be hijacking another one with thread drift....!

What tools and techniques do you use?

I'll go first - though I should be considered more of a dilletante than an amateur...

Sorry - Mostly Mac Only stuff....(I do use a PC also....but mostly for testing....)

MakeCubic - Free!
GraphicConverter - Shareware
Canon PhotoStitch - came with the camera!

More later when I have a bit more time....

PhotoshopCS - and www.ptgui.com



Doug

Thank you for the big image. Wonderful look-out - a sunny day (moment) in Frisco! I've never seen the city in this view.

The transitions (what is the English for that?) between the frames are already quite good. If the frames could yet transfer separately in the Photoshop, it would be so easy to made a perfect pan. Probably it's no more possible. So far I can see that's a main problem with panorama software.

The frames do transfer just as pictures, though they are named differently, I guess with information for the panorama software. They aren't actually joined in the camera, just marked as part of the panorama. So you can always tweak in Photoshop... if so inclined. I didn't spend so much time on the San Francisco pano, so I agree that it is always possible to make it better!

I was impressed with the quality of this consumer camera and we waited for quite some time before buying one. We bought the Canon A80 to replace our "snapshot" camera (my wife still uses her 35 mm SLR) but we have found ourselves using the digital one more often!

That view is from the roof of a friends apartment.... I am jealous to say the least!

edited for clarity - I hope!

Your're right about the quality, I guess the quality of the CCD's and Lenses are proper too - not only the number of pixels.

Due to the frames for the pan, when the frames are finally stitched and rendered (created) to such a pan as yours JPG in the link, then one can't they separately transfer in Photoshop yet, can one? At the moment, I give PTgui a trial. As far I can see it isn't possible with it.

BTW my best result at the moment by using navcam pictures (750KB):
Oppy by Vostok on sol 399

Yes, this generation of mid range cameras seem to have a good balance of quality for the price.

The individual frames are just JPG files, so they can be stitched in any program, but once the panorama is assembled in PhotoStitch and saved, then you can't edit it anymore; not like layers in Photoshop. The frames don't get deleted so you can still play with them any way you want to.

The Canon software only seems to work well with images from the Canon camera, it must understand the file name code and match the seams automatically. I couldn't get good results with the MER photos.

Doug uses ptgui for his excellent work, and it looks like you are doing a fine job as well!

Here are two local pans I shot with my digital camera about an hour and a half from home in the Smokies. I stitched them in Photoshop. These are compressed versions.

The second one.

Here is one of Ozone Falls on the Cumberland Plateau. Unfortunately, I accidentally put in a 16 MB card instead of my 512 MB card, so I didn't get to take shots to fill the whole 4x6 mosaic, hence the black areas. Kind of a Galileo antenna feeling. I still like it though.

Here is a small pan near Harpenden, Hertfordshire, England.

All very nice, but this one is my favorite....
Vertigo-riffic!

Here are some Smoky Mountain pans in the winter (all put together and compressed for upload)

If you think that is vertigo, check out thiis shot of Piney Falls in Fall Creek Falls State Park, also here in Tennessee on the Cumberland Plateau (Granted this is not a pan, but it definitely leads to vertigo!)

http://www.djellison.plus.com/don_pan/

Some pans I did up at Donington Park

Sadly, my Minolat Dimage 5 is beginning to get thru batteries like anything - as one last hurrah I'm going to make an external battery pack for it


Doug

Hi Tedstryk, the Ozone Falls is my favorite too. How much water have you used for this pan?

BTW, there are such outlandish cows in England...

As a drunken student at boarding school in the late '90s - a favorite cotswold past time of ours was cow-tipping.

Go out at about 2am and start making cows fall over.

It was cruel, it was unfair, it was naughty.

But my GOD it was funny!

Doug

Sounds like me as a drunken high school student out in Washington County (the county surrounding my hometown of Bristol, Virginia). It was a blast, except for the day we pushed one and it didn't tip! It lurched towards us, but fortunately proceeded to run in the other direction...but it gave enough of a scare!

Cow Tipping!
by Eugene O'Neil
(inspired by the Beach Boys)

Well, it's after three o'clock so let's all skip our class and chug a beer!
(cow tipping! cow cow tipping!)
and then once we're really trashed, we'll find a field about a mile from here!
(cow tipping! cow cow tipping!)
cow tipping, let's tip a cow! oh baby
cow tipping, I'll show you how! oh baby
cow tipping, cow tipping every day!

We'll find ourselves a cow that's just standing there, fast asleep!
(cow tipping! cow cow tipping!)
Then we'll knock it to the ground, there is no other thrill that is so cheap!
(cow tipping! cow cow tipping!)
cow tipping, it's such a treat! oh baby
cow tipping, it can't be beat! oh baby
cow tipping, cow tipping every day!

We hurt a cow the other day, but we don't feel a bit of grief
(cow tipping! cow cow tipping!)
because it's only fun and games we know they're only walking slabs of beef!
(cow tipping! cow cow tipping!)
cow tipping, I love to play! oh baby
cow tipping, what can I say! oh baby
cow tipping, cow tipping every day!

Well you can really tell that we're a bunch of erudite colligiates
(cow tipping! cow cow tipping!)
when we can topple cattle to the foot of cow-heaven's pearly gates
(cow tipping! cow cow tipping!)
cow tipping! that's what I said! oh baby
cow tipping! get it through your head, that I like
Cow tipping, cow tipping every day!

My dad took out a second mortgage so that I could go to school
(cow tipping! cow cow tipping!)
I suppose when I flunk out that I will make him look like such a fool
(cow tipping! cow cow tipping!)
cow tipping, I just don't care! oh baby
cow tipping, I just wanna be where I can be
cow tipping, cow tipping every day!

----
from http://www.cs.umb.edu/~eugene/cow.html
sorry for getting carried away...

Tedstrick: one more vote for Ozonefalls

COW TIPPING!?!??!?!
And I started this thread because I didn't want to stray off topic in another forum!

LoL, that's really funny. This thread took quite a tangent here... We must tell the moderator... <looking back: oooops>

If I ban myself - lots of strange things happen and anyone who's reading the forum has a small event horizon appear on their monitor as the screen shrinks to the size of a stamp, then vanishes down the hole in the middle.

Somehow - with finishing a big project at work, seing a dust devil - then another one - then seing the powerhike, I'm in a really odd party mood. I really want to have MER party !!

Doug

Oh cow-tipping I never heard before It must be because I'm here in Switzerland, the land that his cows cultivates (you know milk, chocolate, cheese and a lot feedlots of alps)

And btw one don't play with his food on the other hand, we would have a little problem, by many of ours herds of cows grazes bulls today again... yeeha! (close to nature farming).

Doug your pans at Donington Park looks nearly perfect. Have you all created by using PTgui?

What myself bothering by PTgui: self one cannot blow up the picture in the panorama editor in order to place it perfectely. And it seems it have also problem if the focal length is as short as by the navcam frames. Have you wangle once that the horizon was perfectly horizontal and also the seams on the horizon?

All the Donington stuff was done straight in PTGui - infact those panoramas are what taught me how to do the whole mosaic stitching 'thing'.

I've never been able to get Navcam to stitch well - it's just too wide an angle - the camera bar moves so much between frames that there is a different perspective at the overlap of frames

Which gives me an idea - why not have your mast mounted camera so that the camera used most often for imaging (i.e. left with MER ) - is over the rotational axis ot the mast - that would reduce parallax effects to a degree

doug

Now you bring it up, of course the cameras are out rotational axis. I only wonder about the navcam pans from JPL, they must have a special software only for their facilities - and besides a perfect template so as to correct the lens shadowing effects.
The pancam are even more out of the axis but they are much deeper in focal length.

Hi doug, due to the problem the navcam pics to stitch correct with PTGui. I've found a "nice switch" to bring it better together. In "Panorama Settings" there is the menu item "Morph-to-fit" and changed from "Disable" to "All control points" it create following pan: http://www.greuti.ch/oppy/nav-vostok-sol399b.jpg

Before stitching with PTGui I have processed the pics in order to get better match in shade of grays.

What an amazing software! What do you think?
BTW, with "Autostitch" I cann't it yet bring matching. But it's maybe only a problem with menu adjustment. What "Autostitch" can do with my raw El-Paso pictures is amazing too. Not perfect but it's crazy close.