Background: How to Create Great Panoramas

Of course you'll find hints and tips and instructions and advice about photographing and panorama images almost everywhere. So these are just some results from practical experience which I either consider important or which are not so well-known yet.

You decide about the quality of a panorama image when performing these two steps: First taking the shots and later putting the parts together (which is commonly called "stiching").

Today's digital consumer cameras typically have a focal length of 35 mm (referring to 35 mm film) which corresponds to a horizontal field of view of about 53°. There are some 24...28 mm cameras (HFOV=74°...65°) which are better suited for panoramas. I currently use a camera with a 24 mm lens which covers a full-sphere panorama with 20 single shots. With shorter focal lengths, you need less shots, but get less resolution.

Before taking the series of shots for the panorama, lock the camera's exposure and white balance settings. If available, use the camera's manual mode to set the f-value, exposure time and white balance value appropriate to a spot of average brightness. Use equal settings for the whole series of shots.

If any nearby objects are to appear on your panorama, it's particularly important that you don't change the camera's position between the shots. If you have a tripod with a panorama head, use it (but do you always have one with you?)

Always be aware where the horizon is. This may be the edge of the sea, a plain landscape in the distance, or the eyes of people standing on the same height as you. The horizon should not only be at equal height but right in the center of every image. If this results in cutting important parts of the image, you should consider taking a series of portrait-oriented shots.

The horizontal distance between images should provide sufficient overlapping, but doesn't have to be very precise.

Not all stitching programs (see below) can handle "tilted" images. A tilt of 1 degree can be too much!

Remember, panorado is an image viewer, not a stitching tool! You will need such a tool for stitching your own panoramas. I'll give two examples of good stitching products later.

It's always a good idea to store the original images to a safe place before you do any processing. Use a backup media or at least a write-protected folder on your hard disk.

For stitching, the files should be on a hard disk rather than on a memory chip for performance reasons. Create a working folder that will hold all the source images for one panorama, the stitching software's project file, and the resulting panorama. To copy source files from your camera to the working folder, you can use the multiple-file selection capabilities of the Panorado thumbnail view.

It's important to use good stitching software. I'd like to give two very different examples of good products:

• On the one hand: AutoStitch. This is demo sofware which does almost everything automatically, mostly with good results. But in case it takes any bad guess, you don't have a chance to interfere manually.
• On the other hand: PTGui which is an interactive tool originally based on the legendary Panorama Tools collection. This is sophisticated software with a well-designed user interface and perfect mathematical background which combines automatical and manual processing. After you have set up everything you should plan to have the stitching done as a batch job overnight - at least for stitching large images with limited memory size.

You'll find short descriptions and links to stitching software on the links page.

When stitching is done, some fine-tuning will have to be applied to the resulting image. I'm sure you will use your favorite image editor software - for correcting image transitions, adding some lines to the pavement or painting parts of the sky, then do some improvements to the global distribution of lights using a histogram.
If the stitcher has not yet reduced the resolution of the original images, you can normally reduce the image size (I'm talking about pixels, not file size!) to about 70% without losing details.

To get an idea about the memory consumption of large images:
An image of 10,000 by 5,000 pixels which can be stored in a JPEG file of about 20 MB uses 200 MB when loaded into system memory, plus some more memory for manipulations like copying. This is what viewer software like Panorado needs; stitching tools (64 bit version recommended!) are still more demanding.

So don't be surprised if your fast computer gets slow when loading large images!