Posted: Sat Feb 20, 2010 12:26 pm Post subject: |
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Scheimpflug wrote:
You could give Hugin a try as an alternate stitcher. http://hugin.sourceforge.net/
Sharpness may vary between stitchers, but to a certain extent you have to accept that it will vary across the scene... any time you remap a photo as part of a panorama, it will be interpolated, and quality (especially sharpness) will be impacted.
That being said, one trick you can try is to generate an output image that is several times larger than the input images. What this does is help preserve detail in portions of the images that were "squished", where pixels would otherwise be discarded because the destination is lower resolution than the source. It might not make the image look any "sharper", and in fact it would appear to be less sharp at 100% viewing... but when printing the image it would have more detail for a given print size, and may seem sharper as a result.
Blending between frames in panoramas is actually quite complex.. you have to correct for things which are constant (such as the vignetting of the lens and decentered images), as well as things which can vary (exposure differences due to moving clouds covering the sun, white balance changes if your camera didn't lock the WB, moving subjects, lens flare effects due to your orientation, etc). Even your choice of ISO will have an impact, as sensor noise will average out and disappear within the blend zone between frames - a real problem in night panoramas.
Throw in some psychology to learn about how easily humans perceive vertical lines (the blend areas) and gradients which are "too smooth" in real-world images, and it just becomes a big mess. Luckily there are smart people out there to write & provide the software that does the heavy lifting, so that we can just use it without worrying about all of that. |