Stitched Panorama

[jgomez65]

I went to the Grand Canyon about a week ago and took dozens of pictures in secuence, thinking that I would get back home and stich them together to get a big panoramic photo.
When I got home, I played around with the picts for hours, but I didn't like the way they came out when I would stich them. There was always some marks between the photos when I would put them together, or the light would change a little bit between photos and it would make it look fake.
Finally I went online, and found a great program, that did the trick for me and all I had to do was tell it what pictures to stich.

Here is the result


I have a couple others on my Flickr

[malandro95]

Great job on the stitching!

The horizon definitely needs to be leveled out. Also, I'd recommend bumping up your saturation a bit.

Also, I dont' have one, but I would have liked to have seen how the use of a polarizing filter would have changed this shot.

[Nathan deGargoyle]

I think a CP would cause seaming as you would be at a different angle to the sun for each shot.

[cciotti]

What was the program?

[Snowdust]

One thing that will help is to shoot in manual mode, and shoot all the shots at the same settings as the first one that you meter from. It wil give you a more natural looking shot and the exposures will be much closer at the seams. But other than the horizan that has already been pointed out, I thinkg it looks good for a first attempt.

[prince]

Shooting pano is always a challenge. I have tried to get one few times but to no avail. I like the final result, though there can be some improvement to enhance the colors and feel of the Grand Canyon.

Will you tell us what program you used?

[jgomez65]

A big challenge I had was that I didn't have a tripod, so it was hard to take all the pics at the same level
I did take all the pics in auto mode, perhaps manual would have been better like someon pointed out.
Interesting enought, I don't remember now if the mountains in the background does go "down" like the final shot. They are defentely not leveled in the original shots, but I am not sure if the inclination is the way it look on the rendered shot

The program I used is called AutoPano Pro
There website is here:
http://www.autopano.net

Also, prince what would you recommend I do about enhansing the colors?

Thanks
Jorge

[inkista]

Most folks "drift" when they're doing freehand pano shooting. You may want to think about shooting multiple rows of images to cover enough of the scene so that you can rotate and crop to correct the horizon in post. Also, shooting with the camera in portrait orientation, instead of landscape, can help increase your vertical coverage.

You don't need a tripod or panohead unless you're going to be running into parallax error with nearby subjects.

For color enhancement, I'd say try increasing contrast and saturation. Using an S-curve in Curves can do that for you.