Ray, Asher and Cem,
Thanks for looking.
Ray,
I think it is partly because there is some distance/perspective things going on. The hills in the background are not parallel to the film plane, and there is some increasing distance haze presen
In general I don't bother too much about keeping the focal plane constant, especially with the distances involved in this type of panorama - the software looks after it. I was a bit constrained in this case as the left side was at almost 90 degrees. To have taken anything further left would have meant moving forwards to avoid a large tree, which would have involved a 800 ft drop and a degree of vertical mis-alignment.
Asher,
Is this near you or a once in a while trek?
It's a 300 mile drive to get there, but a place I visit whenever I'm able.
You have taken on a huge challenge....
And a huge file - about 300 Mb for a 16-bit tiff. My intention is to make a print - about 54" on A4 roll paper - but experimentation is expensive in time, paper and ink. In fact I ran out of roll paper last night.
I wonder what aperture you chose and how the depth of field and plane of focus was chosen?
The shots were taken at f16. As I said, at these distances I don't think a difference of an inch or two in the plane of focus makes any difference, especially with decent software.
Also, there appears to be a halo between the hills and sky. Is this natural, the result of processing the sky separately from the hills or else sharpening?
Almost certainly a sharpening halo (my eyes are blurry, so I tend to overdo it), but probably also a result of down-sampling from 300 Mb to 900 Kb plus some JPEG artifacts.
In addtion, I have the impression that you might be able to give up the very end, almost flat empty portion of the histogram and then add an S curve to enhance the clarity of the picture and make it "pop", if that idea would fit in with your esthetic sense of how the pano should look.
Do you mean the end of the panorama, or the end of the histogram? I may decide to chop the last 1 1/2 shots off the right hand side. As to the rest, I'm still learning how to use PTGui and Photomatix Pro, so I hope the final result will be improved. The print hanging on my wall should be the acid test.
Cem,
there is room for technical improvement.........
Yes, as I said earlier I'm still experimenting with the software. There are also several dust bunnies which I need to spot heal, and a couple of small mis-alignments in the mountain tops.
How did you get along with PTGui? Is it worth trying?
It's certainly worth a look In fact I liked it so much that I bought it. The pro version offers HDR stitching and tone mapping, but I can do that with other things I already own.
As the name suggests, it's an interface for Panorama Tools, similar to Hugin which Ray has previously mentioned.
Regards to all,
Stuart
