Capturing your images
The first step in creating a panoramic image is to capture the images. You can use a digital camera or regular film. If you use film, you must scan the negatives or prints to make image files. This section contains some general imaging guidelines to help you get better results. See also:
“Creating Panoramas” at http://www.panoguide.com/howto/panoramas/
Alignment
Focus
Overlap
Exposure
Scanning
File format
Alignment
For best results, all images should be made from the same vantage point and with the same camera, lens, focal length, etc.
The camera should rotate around the front nodal point of the lens. The best way to meet this requirement is to use a panoramic bracket to align the lens’s front nodal point. It is beyond the scope of this help file to instruct
you in the fine points of setting up your camera. You’ll find good instructions
at the website www.panoguide.com. See
also:
“Setting up your camera” at http://www.panoramafactory.com/camera_setup/setup.html
“Using a panoramic head” at http://www.panoguide.com/howto/panoramas/setup_panohead.jsp
Small variations in image alignment are acceptable, but increase the ghosting problem. Certain types of ghosts can be corrected with the Fine tune command (Edit menu), but it’s best to avoid them as much as possible.
We recommend using a tripod. However, The Panorama Factory produces excellent results even if your images have amounts of camera rotation, so hand held photography is often possible.
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Focus
It’s best to make all images with the same focus. The quality of the
blend between one image and the next is reduced if there are noticeable
differences in focus between the images. This may or may not be a significant
effect, particularly if you use a wide angle lens. If you have no way to
control focus on your camera, give it a try and see what happens!
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Overlap
The Panorama Factory can work from images that overlap from 1% to 99%. You’ll find that if your overlap region is too small, the scalloping effect from image warping will rob you of the very tops and bottoms of your images. Larger overlaps improve The Panorama Factory’s ability to fine tune (de-ghost), but increase the number of images required. In turn, this increases the RAM requirements, the disk requirements and makes processing take longer.
There is absolutely no advantage to overlapping more than 50%
(although this poses no particular problems to The Panorama Factory). We
recommend a 25% to 50% overlap, but you should experiment and find what works
best for you.
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Exposure
It’s usually best to make all images with the same exposure settings.
Some exposure variations can be corrected by using automatic exposure
compensation, so if your camera has no manual exposure setting you may be OK.
It is particularly challenging to make a 360 degree panorama when the sun is at an angle. For some images you’ll have the sun at your back and for others you’ll be shooting into the sun. In this case you may need to use automatic exposure. In fact, the example panorama used in this manual was made with shutter-priority automatic exposure!
The use of a polarizing filter{XE “Polarizing filter”} is not recommended. You may be accustomed to using a polarizing filter to deepen the intensity of blue skies or to reduce glare. Unfortunately, the effect of a polarizing filter is directional and will change as you rotate the camera from image to image. This will accentuate mismatches in exposure from image to image. Use a non-directional filter like a UV or skylight filter instead.
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Scanning
If you have to scan negatives or prints, it does no good to control exposure when making the photographs if you can’t control exposure during printing and scanning!
Photographic prints may be suitable only if you control the printing process by making the prints yourself or working with a custom darkroom. You would want all the prints to be made with the same darkroom parameters.
You’ll get the best results if you can control the scanner exposure parameters also. Some scanning software performs its own automatic exposure compensation. Disable this if possible.
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File format
The Panorama Factory requires that the image files be TIFF (Tagged Image File Format), JPEG, BMP or PNG images.
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