Critique please - My first Panoromic shot

[rajesh001]

Hi

This is my first panoromic shot after going through the tutorials on this website.

It was a cloudy day and I tried my best. Truly appreciate if you guys let me know how to improve.

Thanks
Rajesh

Camera - Canon 7D
Lens - 95mm
Shutter Speed - 1/100
ISO - 200

[ShantDotMe]

the frame on the right side looks a bit off focus.

Also it is a must to shoot photos for panorama stiching inManual mode, pre set everything so you won't see "color" difference between the frames. Like the sky color difference you have on the far right frame.

here is a feedback I gave a while back on another panorama shot.

If you look at a panorama you see the overall view, not the details. you eyes adjust to view the shadows & the highlights. You can not see the details of the tree & the waterfall at the same time. the same goes with the camera.

For me. the best thing to do is,-
- Take a shot of the most highlighted section of the panorama
- Take another one to the darkest section of the panorama
- Make an average setting that will fit both the best way possible
- Try the average setting on the two points, if ok continue, if not repeat.
- Take the pics with the set settings
- Stitch them, you won't need to do any processing before stitching
- Post process the whole panorama as one image (here is where you can apple a gradient shadow / highlight correction & everything else) Doing it in the final step will eliminate the chance of getting different colored grass / sky ... like you had it in the first panorama & when the settings is applied in gradient mode, it wont have "cuts" like the first.

Just my 2 cents, hope it helps.

[rajesh001]

Thank you so much....

Aww that should do the trick, I did individual post production rather than final panoromic picture.

Also, what do you mean by Manual stiching? Is there such an option in PS cs-4? I read in few forums that use automate while merging. Please correct me if I am wrong..

Thanks
Rajesh

[inkista]

"Manual" is referring to the shooting mode on the camera.

What shooting panoramas, my mantra is "manual manual manual":

Manual exposure mode settings to "lock" so there's no exposure shift between shots.
non-Auto White balance, to "lock" the white balance settings, so there's no color shift between shots.
Manual focus, so there's no DoF shifting between shots.

I'd say the biggest error you made here is not stopping down the lens to f/8 or smaller to get a deep depth of field and crispness, and probably using auto white balance between the shots.

For stitching, I'd actually recommend a PanoramaTools front end, like Hugin, but I'm weird.

[rajesh001]

I did shoot in Manual mode only. As you rightly pointed out, I did not lock the settings on camera for whitebalance or exposure. I will definately remember these for my next shot.

I used Photoshop CS-4 and am new and still playing with it.

Again, thanks so much for your valuable input.

Thanks
Rajesh

[ShantDotMe]

as inkista said, the manual is refered to the camera mode.

Although if you have your camera on a tripod, manual stitching should be something pretty easy to do too, specially if you lens cause a lot of distortion!! but thats another story.

if you shot your pics in manual mode & didn't use auto white-balance, you shouldn't have any problem.

It seems that your problem is post processing the individual images, before stitching. if you do have the originals files, try stitching first and then post process, you'll see the difference