Panoramic Photography

[paulh428]

I'm just an amateur but really interested in panoramic photography. Now, I have two Canon cameras. A Canon Rebel XT and a point and shoot Powershot SD880 IS camera. With the point and shoot, it comes with a "stitch" assist mode where it helps you with panoramic picture taking. How do you even use this mode? The manual doesn't really cover as much as I'd like and hoping anyone is familiar with this mode can help out. Is this simply to help you in post- production?

Lastly, if so, then what's the point of "stitch" assist? Why not just take a panoramic picture with my Rebel XT. And no, I didn't get the point and shoot for this sole purpose. Thanks for help!

Oh yeah, I remember a tutorial or article on panoramas on DPS. I was wondering if anyone had the link. Can't find it since the site changed its layout. Thanks, again!

[nicotine]

Stitch assist just helps you keep certain artifacts in the consecutive pictures so that the pictures are easier to stitch together. The key thing to making panoramas is to make sure that your pictures overlap a little bit so that whatever you are using to stitch the panorama can know where to link the pictures together. You can do it easily on your XT if you keep that last fact in mind.

This was a tutorial I found helpful:
http://photo-class.deviantart.com/ar...norama-5380280

[wattsbw2004]

I know my little P&S had the stich assist and eben stiched it for me in the end so that way it was one file in the end. Only thing about it though was that it can only take like 5 images I think and can only be a single row of images rather than multiple rows stiched together.

[inkista]

The stitch-assist mode on my old Canon S30 did two things, it helped line up shots exactly in the viewfinder, to get more-or-less perfect coverage (doesn't necessarily help with drift up or down, though), and it also named the resultant images files with a letter postfix (_A, _B, etc.) so that the Canon Photostitch software could automatically recognize a group of images that should be stitched together, and place them in order.

IIRC, the Canon P&Ses let you use as many shots as you want in a single row or column, or a four-around pattern. And you can actually cover 360 degrees and make a QuickTimeVR with Photostitch as well. I do remember having problems in Photostitch, though, if I tried to shoot 360 around in portrait mode, or swapped around the orientation of the camera, or tried to do multiple shots. At that point, I needed to find a more sophisticated stitcher (Autostitch, Hugin, PTGui, etc. etc. etc. Actually, I use PTMac and Calico, but I'm weird). They may have updated it since then, but since I went to PTMac, I haven't really looked at Photostitch.

And no, you don't need stitch-assist mode to make panos. But there are times I wish I had it on my XT. Sometimes my guesstimation on coverage can be a wee bit off:


Canon XT. Sigma 8mm Circular Fisheye. Four handheld portrait shots at not quite 90-degrees.

If you're interested in 360x180 panos and QTVR cubics, you want the panoguide board.

[JerBear]

If you google a couple of different terms, you will be surprised at how many articles come up on the subject.

Good luck

JM