Taking Panoramic photos part 2

Now that we have our images we need to make a panoramic photo we just need some decent software to do the work for us!

As I have said in Part 1 I only use Auto Pano pro and have been getting excellent results. Make sure all the photos for your panorama are converted to Tiff or Jpeg and then open Auto Pano pro. You can select all images you want to convert and simply drag them into the program. The really nice thing about Auto Pano Pro is that we can do multiple Panoramas at once. Trust me this feature alone will save you hours of time especially when you are working with Tiff files!

In this screenshot I have imported a few small Jpg images and then clicked the play button. This quickly calculates a rough preview of your image and then allows you to fine tune your panorama by clicking on the edit button.

Now it gets interesting. Don’t be intimidated by all those buttons. We only really need to use 4 of those. I have numbered all buttons in the screenshot for easy referencing.

1

Lets start with the most obvious one and that is choosing how your Panorama will be rendered. The Planar option usually works best to recreate the scene more accurately. The other functions do however come in very handy for when you actually need to fit your photo into a smaller horizontal space.

2

This is the crop button and as you have noticed we will probably have some dead space in our images that we can’t use because there isn’t any pixels there. What the crop tool does is quite simply. The moment your click the crop button it will automatically remove all those areas without pixels. You can however fine tune the crop but it usually does a fine job on it’s own.

3

This button is meant to straighten the horizon in the panorama. With all the stretching to make your photos fit into each other perfectly the Horizon can sometimes become a bit skew. By clicking on this tool it will automatically detect the horizon and level it out for you. I have tried this feature on a few occasions but it has only really worked well with one of my Panoramic photos. To get the best results from this tool you should actually correct distortions brought on by the lens when converting from the RAW file.

4

If for some reason your exposure changed while you were taking your panoramic images then you will love this button. Just one click and it will balance out the color and exposure of all photos.

That’s all there is to it. Now we can click on the render button and watch as this absolutely marvellous software does the rest of the work for us.

Happy Shooting!