Panorama Llama

October 6, 2004

A client of mine recently con­tacted me in regards to putting “inter­ac­tive” panoramic videos on their web site, sim­il­iar to those typ­i­cally found on realty sites. The prepa­ra­tion for this kind of job isn’t extra­or­di­nary nor is it dif­fi­cult but it is time con­sum­ing and in this instance patience is cer­tainly a virtue.

First, you have to decide whether or not you’ll be using a con­ven­tional or dig­i­tal cam­era. Depend­ing on what you use, the results will vary in qual­ity clar­ity, and res­o­lu­tion. Using a tri­pod is rec­om­mended and impor­tant in order to line up your pho­tos and mea­sure your shots incrementally.

For 360 degree images, it’s sug­gested that you take between 12–15 pic­tures depend­ing on the lens of your cam­era. The eas­i­est way to accom­plish this is to think of the num­ber posi­tions on a clock and take each photo at these posi­tions, sim­il­iar to the mil­i­tary tech­nique of plot­ting points on a landscape.

Each photo should over­lap about 15% 33–50% (thanks Erik) and with a decent tri­pod it’s just a mat­ter of mea­sur­ing and esti­mat­ing. Most panoramic soft­ware will blend these images seam­lessly and allow you to line up (using an onion skin effect) adja­cent pho­tos. Some­times this is referred to as “stitch­ing” and depend­ing on the soft­ware you use this is either han­dled auto­mat­i­cally or man­u­ally, but you’ll find that no mat­ter how per­fect it seems you’ll most likely have to fid­get with the pho­tos in order to pro­duce the desired effect.

If you’re savvy enough with Flash and would much rather not pur­chase off the shelf soft­ware, you could always use Action­script to pro­gram a panoramic viewer. For the less tech­ni­cally inclined or for those who have a shorter time frame you’ll find that most panoramic soft­ware, like Panorama Fac­tory will out­put the results in the Quick­time for­mat, which has built in VR capa­bil­i­ties (zoom in, zoom out, pan).

That said, have you ever cre­ated panoramic pho­tos and if so, what soft­ware did you use? 

16 comments

I’ve tried to cre­ate panoramic pho­tos with a built-in fea­ture of Pho­to­shop Ele­ments, but it didn’t work as expected. I think it was because of the images. Maybe it works bet­ter if you take pho­tos of a land­scape, where every­thing is far away… I think I’ll try it again some time.

by Julian on October 6, 2004 at 11:02 am. Reply #

I used to have this pro­gram called Quick­Stitch that shipped with my Olym­pus dig­i­tal about 6 years ago. It worked great, but I can’t get it to run on Windoze2K. Now I’m kickin’ it old school, and mosaic­ing them man­u­ally in Fire­works, which is actu­ally kinda fun and the out­put looks cool most of the time.

by Chad on October 6, 2004 at 12:49 pm. Reply #

I’ve been play­ing around with ULead’s Cool 360 and despite it being 5 years old (in soft­ware time, that’s ancient) it seems pretty intu­itive. At this point I’m not sure whether or not there is some­thing bet­ter out there to do this.

I’ve com­piled panoramic images in the past using Pho­to­shop and/or Fire­works, but never have I exported the image to Quick­time for use on the web.

by kartooner on October 6, 2004 at 4:07 pm. Reply #

Canon ships their Pow­er­shot dig­i­tal cam­eras with a soft­ware pro­gram (for Win­dows) called Pow­er­stitch*. I’ve used it a cou­ple of times with decent results. It works espe­cially well when you use the built-in panoramic mode of the camera.

by Mark on October 7, 2004 at 11:23 am. Reply #

Oops, I mean to say that I can’t be sure that the pro­gram is called Pow­er­stitch as I’m at work and I for­got to bring the lap­top with me.

by Mark on October 7, 2004 at 11:24 am. Reply #

Mark: So far, ULead Cool 360 has impressed me with its results. Ini­tially I used high res­o­lu­tion images and the Quick­time VR file size ended up being about 6MB. See­ing as though most peo­ple wouldn’t want to wait that long I’ve decreased the res­o­lu­tion on the images which resulted in a 619k Quick­time file. Most impressive.

I then saved the final com­po­si­tion as a jpeg file which ended up being almost 180MB.

by kartooner on October 7, 2004 at 3:26 pm. Reply #

i use some canon stitch soft­ware and get good results.

an impor­tant ele­ment to remem­ber, is when set­ting up the cam­era to fix the expo­sure set­tings (shutter/aperture) through­out the 12+ shots, so expo­sure set­tings for each shot are consistent

by david on October 8, 2004 at 6:39 am. Reply #

I’ve shot over 3000 panora­mas and almost all with 12–14 shots around. I just wanted to point out that in my expe­ri­ence, any time I’ve only had 15% over­lap, it’s lead to prob­lems, usu­ally because the stitcher doesn’t have enough area to 1) match up details, or 2) aver­age out dif­fer­ences in color and/or light­ing between the two shots. I usu­ally use any­where from 33 to 50% overlap.

I gotta think that pro­gram­ming your own Flash viewer for panora­mas (par­tic­u­larly ones shot with wide-angle lens) might be a multi-month pro­gram­ming project. There’s a lot of math involved. Check my weblog vrlog.com for men­tion of a Flash viewer you can buy (I have no con­nec­tion with the prod­uct, but post VR news all the time).

Lastly, keep­ing the nodal point of the lens cen­tered over the tri­pod is crit­i­cal to get­ting the stitch­ing to go smoothly. A “pan­head” helps with this.

erik

by erik on October 8, 2004 at 9:33 am. Reply #

Erik: Always good to hear from another Erik (since I share the same name and spelling as well). I appre­ci­ate you shar­ing your thoughts because I’ve never pho­tographed panoramic shots pro­fes­sion­ally before, other than experimenting.

I’ll keep in mind to over­lap at least 30–50%. My exper­i­ment yes­ter­day turned out bet­ter than I had ini­tially expected so I can only expect that with sub­se­quent tests I’ll become more famil­iar with the process.

By the way, you’ve got an excel­lent site. Very resource­ful and infor­ma­tive. :) I’ll be dig­ging through it in the next few days.

by kartooner on October 8, 2004 at 9:55 am. Reply #

Just to update those who are fol­low­ing this dis­cus­sion, per Erik’s Vir­tual Parks site I was able to find a soft­ware title for Win­dows called Panorama Fac­tory. It took me 15 min­utes to take the pho­tos and using Pho­to­shop com­press them from high-resolution to lower res­o­lu­tion. Then, it lit­er­ally only took about 2–3 min­utes total from start to fin­ish to stitch the pho­tos (using the built-in wiz­ard) and out­put to both a jpeg and Quick­time VR file.

The qual­ity of the panoramic image is astound­ing. If you’re in the mar­ket or have the inter­est to cre­ate panoramic images I highly rec­om­mend pick­ing up Panorama Fac­tory for $59.95.

I’ve been research­ing var­i­ous soft­ware to accom­plish these images for the past cou­ple of days and found what I was look­ing for. Now I’m hooked! Yet another pas­sive hobby to add to the list.

by kartooner on October 8, 2004 at 2:25 pm. Reply #

thanks — if there’s any more eriks that join in, we’ll need super­scripts, or some­thing. I’ve heard good things about Panora­maFac­tory but not tried it myself, as it doesn’t run on the Mac.

Oh, and the soft­ware I use is {Apple QTVR Author­ing Stu­dio, RealViz Stitcher} depend­ing on the project.

erik

by erik on October 8, 2004 at 11:55 pm. Reply #

for erik… those are some great panora­mas on your site! thought you might enjoy tak­ing a peek at a site here in SLO where local vir­tual tours are pro­vided to local busi­nesses. They’re doing quite well with it — http://www.virtualslo.com. Not quite as inspir­ing, but another use­ful application.

by richard on October 9, 2004 at 12:15 pm. Reply #

As soft­ware I’m using Pan­oTools together with PTGui (or PTMac), shoot­ing is done with a Canon 300D and a russ­ian Peleng 8 mm fish­eye, 6 shoots in por­trait for­mat, plus one shoot up and one shoot down to get a spher­i­cal or cubic panorama.
For the flash viewer you can try flashvr.de (not spherical)

by Thomas on October 13, 2004 at 12:19 pm. Reply #

I just made one from my Canon Pow­er­shot A75 digi cam. It has the func­tion to take pano pic­tures, then it stiches em together at the end auto­mat­i­cally. It’s pretty nifty, this cam rocks. You can upload wav files to it, load­ing screens etc etc..

Any­ways, heres the pic it made:

http://www.neraweb.com/pano.jpg

by Matt (brother) on October 18, 2004 at 8:35 pm. Reply #

Tri­pod with spirit level is a must for tak­ing these shots. A panoramic head (to shift the lens back onto axis of rota­tion) can be use­ful, but so long as noth­ing impor­tant is closer than about three metres, it won’t be essen­tial. 3d vista stu­dio, is pretty handy for com­pil­ing, but can’t always deal with a suc­ces­sion of full res (at 6.3mp) images. Down-scaling a bit fixes things. Canon’s pho­to­s­titch isn’t bad (espe­cially as its free!). Pretty good results, quite quickly, but 3D vista gives more control.

by Grundibular on June 25, 2005 at 8:04 am. Reply #

Please what is the dif­fer­ence between Sigma 8mm and Peleng 8mm?
Best regards

by alami m'hamed on August 23, 2005 at 5:58 am. Reply #

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