Pano's, should I be refocusing?

Hi, Ben,

Ben Rubinstein said:

Doug, I keep hearing this on forums but in real life it just isn't true, the change in magnification is so very slight that modern software negates it automatically so that everything lines up. It's a non issue as you can see from these examples, sounds good and technical but is inconsequental in the field.

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Sure, and what I said is true from a theoretical standpoint, but as I said, I had no idea if the phenomenon would be consequential in magnitude.

I know older versions of PTGUI couldn't work with refocusing due to the change in magnification and even the present version needs you to decouple the focal length indicator from the images but Autopano Pro does it all automatically and works like a dream.

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Well, it's sure nice to have neat tools!

Best regards,

Doug

I have to admit to be loving it. The last image is 30 megabytes and has huge amounts of resolution but took only a minute to shoot using a 5D and just one lens on a tripod. Cheap, easy and fast and I have a wide choice of clean ISO's (seem to be using a base of 400 for most of these stitches to freeze the foliage/people when stopped down). I'm now experimenting with people in the images, trick is to make sure they only occupy one of the frames of the stitches and with plenty of room around them to make the stitch work.

Ben Rubinstein said:

I'm now experimenting with people in the images, trick is to make sure they only occupy one of the frames of the stitches and with plenty of room around them to make the stitch work.

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Hi Ben,

You can also remove them completely if you make sure that you have at least 2 overlapping shots where the people have moved to different positions. This can also be applied semi-automaticaly in some blenders by masking the people out with an alpha layer before auto-blending the tiles.

Bart

There is a way to do this in PS by taking multiple frames then stacking them, not sure how, if anyone knows I'd appreciate it, seems to me a good way to kill moving foliage as well.

Ben Rubinstein said:

There is a way to do this in PS by taking multiple frames then stacking them, not sure how, if anyone knows I'd appreciate it, seems to me a good way to kill moving foliage as well.

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Hi Ben,

I believe that would require the extended version of CS3, which I don't have. That allows to combine layers in a median average mode, which will remove features that are only present in e.g. 1 out of 3 layers.

A feature of CS3 (any version) not mentioned often is that it apparently honors the alpha mask when blending (pano) layers together. That would allow to selectively disable certain features from 2 or more layer blends, by just adding an alpha mask.

Bart