8 November 2009

This is a step-by-step guide to making panoramas with any digital camera that has a Manual mode and shoots in raw. Often these don't have a "panorama mode". If the camera does, this approach will still give you much more control and better results.

Many consumer point and shoot cameras have panorama settings built in but you'll rarely find this in a digital SLR. You might get this feature if you use an Olympus camera together with Olympus XD cards that enable the feature in Olympus Master, but the XD cards are slow and the Olympus software isn't really the most powerful option anyway.

As with many things, there are other ways of doing this, but this is the way I do it to get consistent seamless results, such as the one above. This tutorial will use images from Punto del Diablo in Uruguay as an example.

Step 1: Take the source photos

This tutorial will use images that have been captured hand-held in portrait orientation with an Olympus E-30 & 50-200mm f2.8-3.5 lens at 128mm (ie. 256mm in 35mm equivalent). Such a long focal length means you end up with a very long panorama image. You generally don't need a special tripod for this type of shot. The exception is when you have close foreground objects that would produce what is called parallax error, or when you'd normally need a tripod such as the one above taken at night.

These are the source images as seen in the browser:

1. Set the camera to shoot in "RAW" mode, not jpeg if you don't usually shoot raw.
2. Set the camera to Manual mode "M".
3. Set the ISO to a fixed value - I recommend ISO 100 on all Olympus DSLRs including the E3, E30 and E620
4. Set the exposure by adjusting the aperture and shutter speed. Generally for these types of shots I recommend an aperture of around 5.6-6.3 on an Olympus DSL-R - higher if you're using APS-C (eg. Nikon d90, Canon digital rebels) or Full frame DSLR (f8-f11).
5. Pan across the intended subject to check the exposure and adjust the shutter speed if necessary - you want a balance between the shadows and highlights. If there is a big range, I'd aim to preserve highlights and have other parts slightly underexposed instead.
6. Take a marker shot so that later you can easily recognise your panorama images amongst others - easiest is a photo of your hand
7. Take a series of images with an overlap of about 1/3 of the image
8. Take a second marker photo of your hand to identify the end

Note: In cases where the subject is moving, such as the water in the above scene, often you'll have minor flaws in the image because the scene has changed between frames.

Step 2: Develop RAW images

This section goes through the steps in Olympus Studio which is my preferred raw developer. If you're using other software, the key is to set the same white balance in all images and to keep all adjustments identical between images.

1. Open relevant folder in Olympus Studio
2. Select all the panorama source images in the browser display
3. Click on the RAW icon on the top menu bar
4. With the first image selected, click on Custom White Balance in the white balance pull-down.

5. Click on apply distortion correction under the Advanced settings tab

6. Click on the "Apply current setting(s) to the checked image(s) icon (bottom left hand corner)

7. Click on "develop and Save Image" - I save as an Exif-tiff file. I don't want to have compression artifacts from JPEG files, given that I'll be saving several versions in this process.

Step 3: Stitch the Panorama

I use Hugin to stitch Panoramas. This is an open source front end that provides a graphical user interface for the Panorama tools software. There are versions that work on OSX, Windows and Linux.

In comparing this to alternatives such as Photoshop, Ive found that it produces more consistent, seamless results. It has a lot of control over things like blending and the type of projection. It works for panoramas taken vertically or horizontally and for multi-row panoramas. Being open source, you can also download and use it free. When installing this program, you'll need to read the installation text file to work out how to install the "autopano sift" plug-in that automatically creates control points.

1. Open files under the "assistant" tab.

2. Enter in the focal length multiplier - ie. "2" for an Olympus DSLR, "1.6" for Canon APSC, "1.5" for Nikon, Sony and Pentax and "1" for full-frame DSLRs

3. Click on the "align" button & wait for the program to calculate and find control points
4. In the panorama preview, adjust the horizon point if necessary. Use the "drag" feature to move the panorama around until it looks right

5. Try selecting a few different projections in this preview to see how they look
6. When you're happy with the general look of the panorama, close the preview
7. Click the "stitching" tab
8. Click both the "Calculate Field of View" and Calculate Optimal Size" buttons. This re-calculates how big your panorama is going to be.

9. Click the "Stitch Now!" button and enter a new file name to save the panorama. Go get a coffee, because this can take a while with big panoramas (eg. the one in this tutorial is over 130 megapixels before cropping!)

Step 4: Edit the panorama in Photoshop or photo editing software

Although you can do some of this directly in Hugin, I prefer to do it in Photoshop, because I then have better control over the tools.

1. Open image in editing software (I currently use Photoshop Elements)
2. Inspect the image at 100% for any flaws. This image has some due to the movement of the water - they can be "fixed" by using the clone stamp to hide the seam.


3. Crop and rotate image
4. If you're planning to do any manipulation such as cloning or levels adjustments, do this now - for this image I've adjusted the brightness slightly and cloned out some imperfections from the moving water.
5. If necessary, re-size the image. In this case the full size un-cropped version is about 70 megapixels - I've reduced the size to about 50 but it's still probably too big for many applications. Note when downsizing images, noise will appear less visible and the image will appear sharper overall!

6. Save as a Jpg and upload for all the word to see!

If you want to see the full-size final result, it can be seen here: Puerto del Diablo, Uruguay (Opens in new window).