bent panoramas - how to do in with macro

nathanm · Post by **nathanm** » Fri May 19, 2017 9:51 am

These photos are pretty amazing

https://petapixel.com/2016/01/28/these- ... ne-photos/

These were made with drones because of the scale, but I think that the same thing could be done with macro.

One would need to do a stitched panorama, where the subject or lens was tilted during the stitched frames. My presumption is that to get the smooth bends it would require more frames than a flat stitch.

Any suggestions on hardware and software to do this?

elf · Post by **elf** » Fri May 19, 2017 6:57 pm

Just change the rotation of the panorama from horizontal to vertical or crop a 360 degree spherical panorama. I don't think there is as much benefit for macros as for landscapes. People expect a certain perspective when viewing landscapes and presenting a different perspective can be striking.

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Fri May 19, 2017 9:58 pm

I'm not sure what elf is trying to say, but I disagree that just changing from horizontal to vertical will produce this effect. To me it seems clear that point-of-view changes drastically from bottom to top. For example in the 7th image, https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/20 ... tadium.jpg, the bottom of the composite image was shot from near ground level in front of the stadium, while the top of the composite was shot from high above the stadium, looking almost straight down.

Because of the changes in viewpoint, parallax will be a big problem in the stitching. Ideally you'd like the viewpoint to change smoothly from one row of pixels to the next, so that the change of viewpoint would be as small as possible between seams. In practice, I'm sure you could get by with fewer, but I'm not sure how many fewer would be OK. For purposes of investigation, I'd probably start with sqrt(panorama height), say 100 frames, and work more or less from there as indicated by the results.

For hardware, I think you'd want to have at least as many degrees of freedom as the drone provided -- elevation, distance along the panorama axis, and pitch of the optical axis -- plus focus.

For software, if you need to focus stack then of course I'd suggest Zerene Stacker, probably using the pre-crop options to make the process go faster.

Stitching could be done, I think, by any of the standard panorama stitchers, just by pretending that the source images came from a fixed camera position with potentially varying focal length so that the pano software could stretch images to make the seams match at least for scale. Perhaps this last point is what elf means by "just change the rotation of the panorama".

--Rik

Davids · Post by **Davids** » Sat Jun 03, 2017 7:52 am

Nathan,
I just stumbled on this article discussing how to make a bent panorama using Photoshop. Hope this is useful to you and cant wait to see what kind of bent macro panoramas you can come up with!

https://petapixel.com/2017/06/02/shoot- ... ne-photos/

nathanm · Post by **nathanm** » Fri Jun 30, 2017 1:43 pm

Thanks, I will give it a try....