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My Panorama Workflow

Submitted by Christopher Glick on Mon, 2008-12-22 09:06.

I'm an amateur and likely always will be.

For shooting, I use a Canon 350D, Peleng lens, and NodalNinja 3. I shoot in RAW then make exposure and white balance adjustments in Canon's Digital Photographer Pro. I export as 16-bit TIFFs. Frequently I forget, but occasionally I run the TIFFs through Kekus' LensFixCI to remedy chromatic aberration before feeding them into a stitcher.

I've come to rely on PTGui and have it set to auto-generate 35 control points per shot pair (6 horizontal, 1 zenith). This is usually enough to ensure I don't need to add too many points later during optimization. I output the finished stitched product as an 8000x4000 16-bit PSD layers and background so I can mask things later.

In PS3, once the most obvious errors are fixed as well as I can, I flatten, sharpen, reduce to 8-bit, and export to TIFF. I then open in CubicConverter to export the bottom face so I can put in a nadir cap (with GIMP--I'm more comfortable with it). That gets reimported and I export both QTVR and the new equirectangular image.

I love hotspots and wish more people felt the same way. The QTVR goes through CubicConnector to add hotspots then gets output. I import the final QTVR into Pano2VR to get my Flash version.

I use Pleinpot to generate the HTML and always offer a Pangea version if it's a single node.

This workflow means each panorama takes about a full day after adding shooting, stitching, processing, and uploading time.

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Re: My Panorama Workflow

Submitted by Ton den Ouden on Tue, 2009-01-27 03:44.

Your workflow seems bit overcomplicated to me, Christopher. Here a small tip to save yourself some time: you can open all your RAW files at the same time in Photoshop. Make a profile for the Peleng lens, including chromatic corrections, so you can't forget that anymore. Make your white balance corrections and save them directly to the directory of your choise. This will save you a lot of time.
And making 2 or 3 extra downshots can make your life much easier and your pano more interesting. You can make 2 extra downshots in an angle of 90 degrees, move your tripod and make an extra one of the space where your tripod was. Mask the the panohead of the first two in PS3 and the tripod legs of the 3rd. Tell Ptqui that the 3rd is a viewpoint.
The right workflow is very important. I usually finish a 10 shot pano in HDR (total some 50 pics)on average in about 4 hours, but I do have a very fast PC with lots of memory.
Regards, Ton.

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Re: My Panorama Workflow

Submitted by Christopher Glick on Tue, 2009-01-27 12:33.

Dear Ton,

Thank you very much! Your tips sound extremely useful for me. My workflow is, indeed, highly inefficient.

Yours,

Chris

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