Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Magome panorama -.- PTGui versus Photoshop

During my trip to Japan I took a couple of photos with the idea of turning them into panoramas; my previous experiments with the Photomerge feature of Photoshop had worked out really well and I was sure that it would be perfect for vacation shots as it would give me the image of the view that I remembered. However, the photos I brought back yielded pretty disappointing results in Photomerge. I shoot in RAW and while processing the files, I had followed the rules and made sure that all photos used the same white-balance, etc. However, the stitching was very apparent in the result, most notably in the sky and clouds, and I dropped the whole plan.

This weekend I revisited the idea and decided the pull down the trial version of PTGui and, surprise, surprise, the result didn't give me the same problems and, in fact, looked pretty good. All of a sudden it was my photos that were showing their weaknesses and not the tool anymore. The fact that PTGui supports 16bit images seems to make all the difference in preventing banding in the sky.

Camera: Pentax *ist DS, lens: 18-50mm F2.8 EX DC MACRO