Here's a night pano of Phoenix, taken from a POV north/northeast of downtown. The downtown skyline is visible far right.
Click for larger version (6000px wide). :)
Good Job. I tried taking a pano of Phoenix from the Compass Restaurant on top of the Hyatt downtown one time. That has the best easily accessible view of downtown there is. But the rotation of the resturant ruined every night shot. There were streaks in every image. Bummer!
This is not post processed in any way and stitched with Hugins which I think is the best pano software combination and does not cost anything.
I did a series of tests with this very image using different pano software products and put them with other panos here:
Steve's Panoramas
Btw... If you look at other panoramas than Mount St. Helens in that gallery and see the guy in red... that is kirbic. Now, I ask you really, do you wanna take panorama advice from a guy that looks like that? ;) LOL!!!
Here's a night pano of Phoenix, taken from a POV north/northeast of downtown. The downtown skyline is visible far right.
Click for larger version (6000px wide). :)
Good Job. I tried taking a pano of Phoenix from the Compass Restaurant on top of the Hyatt downtown one time. That has the best easily accessible view of downtown there is. But the rotation of the resturant ruined every night shot. There were streaks in every image. Bummer!
Thanks Steve. I tried getting a friend who works at BofA downtown, whose building is perfect for shooting lower downtown facing north, to get me in after hours so I could shoot a few from the top floor ... but security wouldn't go for it.
The pano I posted was taken from the hilltop next to The Pointe, Tapatio Cliffs Resort. I'd like to go back and snap a few more at the "blue hour", for a more interesting sky and better shadow detail, and on a Sunday, when the haze has moved out.
I tried getting a friend who works at BofA downtown, whose building is perfect for shooting lower downtown facing north, to get me in after hours so I could shoot a few from the top floor ... but security wouldn't go for it.
The pano I posted was taken from the hilltop next to The Pointe, Tapatio Cliffs Resort. I'd like to go back and snap a few more at the "blue hour", for a more interesting sky and better shadow detail, and on a Sunday, when the haze has moved out.
Yours has more altitude than I would have thought possible from there, but a nicee view. If you can gain access from another downtown building other than BofA but close you will get the great view and good night panorama of Phoenix.
I've used CS2 and with a lot of work found you can get a good result with "Photomerge" and it is, by far, the easiest to work with.
However, my experience compared to the merging capabilities with just about every other commercial and/or free stitch software available is that it produces the worst result and requires far more post processing 'adjustments' than anything else to get an accepatable result.
In my experience the areas that need the most post processing with CS2 are lighting merge and detail merge and those are what stitching are all about. Hopefully CS3 is better.
The skies are the toughest in CS2's merge, especially if done using a polarizer. The advanced blending mode does help though.
(reminds self NOT to use a polarizer shooting panos..)
I's not perfect, but have done one in a 60" x 12" print, and wow!
The skies are the toughest in CS2's merge, especially if done using a polarizer. The advanced blending mode does help though.
(reminds self NOT to use a polarizer shooting panos..)
It's not perfect, but have done one in a 60" x 12" print, and wow!
I did the following image with CS2 that looks OK for 3 rows and 29 images:
Be sure to click 'original' to see the larger uploaded size and that is nowhere near its actual size. It looks OK, but required a lot more work in CS2 after merging than virtually any other free or commercial stitching software I've tried. I'd prefer to use CS2's Photomerge because of its incredible ease of use, but do use Hugins because it does a far better job up front and ultimately requires less 'tweaking'. :)
[quote=Rob O]
Click for larger version (6000px wide). :)
Yours has more altitude than I would have thought possible from there, but a nicee view. If you can gain access from another downtown building other than BofA but close you will get the great view and good night panorama of Phoenix.
There's a great spot from the Hwy 51-to-Loop 202 transition to get a west-facing pano of the city skyline ... but you might lose your life in the process given Valley drivers and the fact you'd have to take it from the shoulder of a 50' high onramp! ;-)
I'm going to try and shoot something from the top of the Papago Buttes (west facing) and see how it compares. It'll be about the same distance as the above, but the skyline can be more easily isolated.
The above link presents a *lot* of very good, detailed information. Using the information there, you should be able to get up the learning curve very quickly. One point regarding handheld panos. They can be very good indeed, but when there are near objects in the frame, you'll rapidly learn how big a problem parallax can be. For more typical landscape panos, it's entirely possible to get great results handheld, with some practice.
The above link presents a *lot* of very good, detailed information. Using the information there, you should be able to get up the learning curve very quickly. One point regarding handheld panos. They can be very good indeed, but when there are near objects in the frame, you'll rapidly learn how big a problem parallax can be. For more typical landscape panos, it's entirely possible to get great results handheld, with some practice.
Edit:
A word about stitching software. There are a lot of stitching programs out there, including some pretty decent capability built in to Photoshop CS2 and CS3. With stitchers, the devil is in the details. Better stitchers will be able to match a well-shot series within one to two pixels at nearly all points, making blending of images *much* easier. Skies are often problematic, because of lens effects like light fall-off and variations in sky polarization (even without a polarizer mounted). It's important to bot take as much care as possible to correct vignetting and fall-off prior to stitching, and to output your stitched pano to a multi-layered format, either TIFF or PSD, that will allow you to tweak blending later.
