Rudi
06-10-200710th June 2007, 06:18 AM
... got me to try it out! :D
I don't shoot too many panoramas, but you might remember that I did a few back in January, while in the middle of a comet hunt (comet McNaught had already set). In the past, I used several different panorama programs to get what I wanted. Never spent too much money on one, since panoramas are not that important to me, and I always had the choice to do one manually with Photoshop (CS and CS2 back in the day :)).
Seeing that I recently acquired CS3, and that I've heard nothing but good things about how it handles panoramas, I decided to dig out my old RAW files and try it. Now... I did NOTHING to these files before Photomerge. I just selected the RAWs in Bridge, and then clicked on the Photomerge command, and voila!
This one was a simple stitch of three 5D RAWs:
http://rudiphoto.zenfolio.com/img/v0/p714739591.jpg
... but it was this one that blew me out of the water! It is a stitch of 14 5D RAW files (shot in vertical orientation). Again, all I did was select them in Bridge and let the software do its thing. The finished panorama, after cropping off the edges, ends up being 29729 x 4283 pixels, or a 127 megapixel image!
http://rudiphoto.zenfolio.com/img/v0/p708226645.jpg
One more thing - the full-res files look as good as these resized Web images! And I did not even bother to prepare anything - in the past I converted the RAWs so that the colour temp and everything matched before the stitch... I didn't bother this time, since I wanted to give CS3 a real test. Perfect? No... but if I actually set out to go and shoot a panorama properly, you bet they would be! :)
I don't shoot too many panoramas, but you might remember that I did a few back in January, while in the middle of a comet hunt (comet McNaught had already set). In the past, I used several different panorama programs to get what I wanted. Never spent too much money on one, since panoramas are not that important to me, and I always had the choice to do one manually with Photoshop (CS and CS2 back in the day :)).
Seeing that I recently acquired CS3, and that I've heard nothing but good things about how it handles panoramas, I decided to dig out my old RAW files and try it. Now... I did NOTHING to these files before Photomerge. I just selected the RAWs in Bridge, and then clicked on the Photomerge command, and voila!
This one was a simple stitch of three 5D RAWs:
http://rudiphoto.zenfolio.com/img/v0/p714739591.jpg
... but it was this one that blew me out of the water! It is a stitch of 14 5D RAW files (shot in vertical orientation). Again, all I did was select them in Bridge and let the software do its thing. The finished panorama, after cropping off the edges, ends up being 29729 x 4283 pixels, or a 127 megapixel image!
http://rudiphoto.zenfolio.com/img/v0/p708226645.jpg
One more thing - the full-res files look as good as these resized Web images! And I did not even bother to prepare anything - in the past I converted the RAWs so that the colour temp and everything matched before the stitch... I didn't bother this time, since I wanted to give CS3 a real test. Perfect? No... but if I actually set out to go and shoot a panorama properly, you bet they would be! :)