Wormshill Church

[S_J_P]

Hi all, here's a 12-image panorama of Wormshill Church in Kent taken with an IR72 (720nm) infra red filter, originally processed in DPP (as Adobe can't handle the extreme white-balance setting) and then stitched in Elements 9, cropped, transformed (again I tried a variety of options), channel-swapped, levels tweaked, some dodging/burning, and finally a grad applied in Lightroom.

I struggled for ages with the stitching, trying reposition options but finally letting Elements do it's magic in Auto which has resulted in the curved church roof.

My thinking was that by taking twelve portrait-format images which significant overlap I'd be able to minimise the converging verticals and distortion, but that's not been so successful.

Any advice from the seasoned panorama pros out there on how to best approach this type of scene to minimise the curvature?


Worms Hill Church Panorama Colour Infra Red by S.J.P, on Flickr

EOS 6D/EF 17-40 f/4 L at 17mm, 12 x 15 seconds at f/8 ISO 1,600, WB from sunny-grass

[tesarver]

Re: Wormshill Church

With LR5 they have a new feature for Lens Correction. Under the basic tab I Click on the auto button to allow LR do it's magic in fixing Lens Distortion before exporting the images off to Elements. What I found that this little step fixed a lot (not all) building perspective issues allowing Elements to create better Panoramas.

Tom

[AndyA]

Re: Wormshill Church

I like that, Steve.

[S_J_P]

Re: Wormshill Church

Thanks for the advice Tom, I don't usually use the distortion correction (in LR 4.4), but perhaps it might help! I must try that next time.

Thanks for looking Andy :)

[Stan]

Re: Wormshill Church

I quite like the infra red effect but not too keen on the warping

Stan

[DrJon]

Re: Wormshill Church

What do you think is the angle of view of the whole Panorama? I ask as if it's over 120 degrees it will be tough as there's no "perfect" way to handle that.

I really like it a lot, except for the church tower which I think could do with some work. I still have my old IR filter around somewhere from when I used to do IR imaging, but it didn't let any visible light in so was very B&W. I like the touch of colour.

It might be worth trying a more panorama-based stitcher. Ones that come to mind include hugin (free but I've not used it), Autopano, Microsoft ICE (free) and Ptgui pro.

[S_J_P]

Re: Wormshill Church

Thanks for the advice DrJon!

False colour IR is one of those techniques which requires an awful lot of faffing about in post-production so I don't bother with it unless I think the scene would benefit from it, but it is at least a technique which benefits from intense sunlight which can make traditional photography impractical, so it's an excuse to get out with the camera

This Pano spans around 270º, so perhaps I'm expecting too much of the stitching program. I've used ICE before (but I don't think it's available for the Mac) and it seems to get good press so I'll have a go at stitching using ICE on the PC and compare the results with Elements.

[DrJon]

Re: Wormshill Church

There is a free demo for Autopano which might be interesting to try and is very automated (there's a demo for PtGui Pro as well). What projection did you use?

...and I really do like it, good stuff!

P.S. one of the problems with doing a lot of post-stitching work on a pano is it's usually about 90 secs later you spot a stitch error and have to decide whether to start again. I've found one on the Tate Modern Pano, but haven't quite managed to fix it yet. My early panos were really just stitch and go, but the quickie technique used there needs a little work in Photoshop, so I think I'll get it to be really pretty good before going there again. Could be a while in this heat... hunched over a computer for hours is not a good look (sweat always seems to look better on well-lit models... then again it's usually cool water out of a bottle...)