correcting parralax error

[robert lamont]

Hello everyone, i went to see Ken Duncan speak at a seminar on the weekend and i was surprised at the bloke's attitude ( in a good way). He was very informative and funny as well. Quite willing to help people with tips, tricks and refreshing ideas. After he mentioned stitching panoramas together i took an interest. Always knew about stitching but put it in the "too hard" basket. He demonstrated some gear used to correct parralax error and i thought this isn't as hard as i first thought. The gear does cost a bit but the results were nothing short of breathtaking!
Anyway found an article about correcting parralax error here, if anyone is interested

Finding The Nodal Point of Your Lens - Photography Reviews, How-To, and Galleries of Digital Grin

Recomend going to see the man if you ever get the chance!

[3bayjunkie]

Photoshop pretty much does all the stitching for you now-days... Id put it in the "too easy" basket
Kind of a no-brainer

[DanielLane]

And if you get the right hardware, you can avoid parallax error in the first place. I bought a Nodal ninja to do panorama's. Works fantastically!

[inkista]

Another happy Nodal Ninja user, here. You don't need to spend oodles of cash on RRS gear.

3bayjunkie: parallax error can keep any software (including Photoshop) from properly stitching images together. Once you have parallax error from rotation, no amount of digital warping is going to get the images to match, because objects have "moved" relative to each other between shots.

OTOH, if you're shooting landscapes where everything's relatively far away from you, you probably don't need to worry too much about parallax error. If you're shooting panos indoors, though, you almost inevitably need to.

And when it comes to stitching software, I like to point people to Hugin if they don't want to spend any money. It can stitch stuff Photoshop's merge simply can't handle. Doing stuff like correcting bowed/wavy horizons from camera pitch errors is cake in Hugin and PTGui. Not so much Photoshop's merge.

[DanielLane]

Never tried hugin. I've got PT Gui. works great!

[inkista]

I love PTGui, too, but most folks don't necessarily want to spend €79/€149 on a stitcher, particularly at the beginning when they're starting out and just want to see what it's like.

Hugin is open source and free, and, like PTGui, it was originally based on Helmut Dersch's Panorama Tools, so it can do the lens correction, enfuse/HDR, and equirectangular stuff that PTGui can. There's also experimentation on automatically correcting for exposure, vignetting, white balance, and response curve of member images all at once. Hugin can be fun, simply because all the bleeding edge open source graphics CLI (command line interface) tools like to use it as a GUI.

[Krusty79]

Or if you have tools, you can make your own panoramic head:

Studio Gear - How to Build a Panoramic Tripod Head for $10 - Worth1000 Tutorials

[inkista]

True. Or go with a Panosaurus.

[DanielLane]

That Panosaurus will still get parallax issues. It's missing the extra arm to get the lens out to center on the front glass. Though it will work fine for point and shoots. It also won't give the ability to go full 360 spherical.

That build your own is nice, but not accurate enough for doing huge gigapixel spherical photos. Nice idea though for general pano's!

[inkista]

Originally Posted by DanielLane

That Panosaurus will still get parallax issues. It's missing the extra arm to get the lens out to center on the front glass.

Uh.... think you misread that first photo. It has both arms, like the NN, rotates in pitch and yaw, and is adjustable along both axes.

...Though it will work fine for point and shoots. It also won't give the ability to go full 360 spherical.

It's perfectly capable of doing zenith/nadir shots, and rotation in both yaw and pitch. That's all you need.

Agreed, it has far less capability for longer lenses than the bigger Nodal Ninja 5 would have, but it's still capable of being used for equirectangulars with shorter lenses.