Saturday, May 26, 2018

The Tale of Three Panoramas

Originally I was planning to put the Olympus Camera Panorama “feature” through its paces. Well to cut a short story shorter, the panorama feature in my new M10ii doesn’t stitch the images in camera. It just gives you guide lines to follow. So I abandoned try he feature further and decided to test the stitching of images with different lenses and different camera orientations.

Rather than falling back on my favourite panorama stitcher AUTOSTITCH I decided to do all the post processing in On1 Photo RAW, mainly because it seems to handle the Olympus .orf RAW files best.

TESTING LENSESTESTING LENSES

I’ll begin with the simple panorama, just two images shot semi wide with 14mm ( Jpegs shown above straight from camera). Notice the images are exposed differently. I then used the .orf files and began by stitching them, then I took the result into the On1 develop, adjusted the horizon slightly and did a little tonal tweaking. Finally I took the adjusted but barely post processed panorama into the Dynamic Contrast setting in Effect module via the Natural “filter”. The results are pretty reasonable.

TESTING LENSES

Next I turned the camera vertically, added my circular polarizing filter and took 7 overlapping photos of roughly the same scene. I post processed this in On1 Raw following the same steps. Another decent panorama, much bigger and possibly a stronger image (because I include the strong darks of the trees on the right.

TESTING LENSES

For the last panorama I took 15 photos with an 75mm telephoto and undertook the same steps as the previous two panorama. This took a lot longer and created a massive file 26480x3970 (1,154.MB). It so wide I doubt I ever want to get it printed BUT it is massively detailed. I’ve done it now and may never do it again yet I now know how to do it.

TESTING LENSES

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