Glasgow University Cloisters

[Ped]

Glasgow University is one of those places that I pass often, but this was the first I had actually entered the grounds and I wasn't disappointed. The buildings themselves are quite stunning and the cloisters area is like the icing on the proverbial cake. I was a bit worried about vibration when taking the snaps for this as the wind was blowing quite strongly through the courtyard but my trusty NN3, perched atop my ball head, stood firm. Bracketed exposures, merged together with Enfuse droplet, Stitched with PTGui and very little retouch work in PhotoShop with final QT output by Pano2VR: http://panocorner.com/qtvr/glasgow_university.html

Ped

[nick fan]

Wow, excellent work!

nick

[Wim.Koornneef]

Hello Ped,

Except for the dark nadir (devignetting issue ?) the pano looks great. Are you the guy in the corner besides the tripod ?

Wim

[John Houghton]

The panorama is good but could be better. There are small stitching errors that might have been avoided in PTGui but which could be easily corrected in postprocessing. It also needs levelling properly. This takes only 40 seconds or so and is worth doing: http://www.johnhpanos.com/levtut.htm. The qtvr tile size corresponds to an equirectangular size of 4712x2356, which is on the low side for full screen display. You could increase the size and compression and still end up with a ~2Mb .mov file. The image is quite soft and would benefit from some sharpening. As alread pointed out, the nadir is disappointing; the lighting makes cloning difficult, so a separate nadir shot patched in is probably necessary to get a good result.

John

[Ped]

To Nick: Thanks.

To Wim: I am not sure, but think the overly dark nadir may be my own shadow moving around the tripod as I take my snaps (I use a Canon 18-55mm kit lens on my 400D, so is 3 rows of 10 images + 1 up) Which is something I will have to pay attention to in future. And "Nope" the photographer in the corner isn't me, I don't move that quickly It is quite a photogenic wee spot and we just happened to be there at the same time. He does give an added interest though

To John: All points taken on board and I will have another look at it later to see if I can improve it any.

I have two more pano's that were taken in the courtyards at either side of the cloisters and I have still to make a start on those.

Ped

[Ped]

The panorama is good but could be better. There are small stitching errors that might have been avoided in PTGui but which could be easily corrected in postprocessing. It also needs levelling properly. This takes only 40 seconds or so and is worth doing: http://www.johnhpanos.com/levtut.htm. The qtvr tile size corresponds to an equirectangular size of 4712x2356, which is on the low side for full screen display. You could increase the size and compression and still end up with a ~2Mb .mov file. The image is quite soft and would benefit from some sharpening. As alread pointed out, the nadir is disappointing; the lighting makes cloning difficult, so a separate nadir shot patched in is probably necessary to get a good result.

John

Well, I have remade the pano and put in a couple of vertical control points, lightened up that dark nadir tile which is still far from perfect (was driving me nuts, so I stopped) finally sharpened the tiles using the high pass filter:

End result: http://panocorner.com/qtvr/glasgow_university.html

Earlier attempt for comparison: http://panocorner.com/qtvr/cloisters1.html

Ped

[John Houghton]

Ped, That's a really big improvement in terms of clarity. It's as if a veil has been lifted, and the nadir is also much better. To be picky, which I am, there's still the 15 or so small stitching errors in the lines of the floor tiling. They can all be corrected in about 20min.

John

[Ped]

Aye, 20mins to you John may equate to a couple of hours for me and has nothing to do with any time dilation theories. :blushing: I did see some aberrations around the floor area, but the ones I see are more to do with my flawed "retouching" as I actually drew the tile lines over where I thought the old ones should have been, but avoided going right to the edge of the nadir, basically because I wasn't sure if it would work that well. I will have another poke around with it though.

Ped

There is nothing wrong with a picky pair of eyes, it may focus my less than perfect vision

[John Houghton]

It's really quite quick to correct the small discontinuities in lines. The more you do the quicker you get. In Photoshop, work on a rectilinear view such as one of the cubic tiles or a view extracted with PTEditor. I'll use a stitching error from your panorama as an example.

Start by making a long sausage shaped selection along the line and through the break like this:



Then copy the selection to a new layer using ctrl/c and ctrl/v.
Then goto Edit->Transform->Rotate
Hold down Alt and drag the centre point marker to the left end of the sausage. The top image is going to be rotated about that point.



Now move the cursor to the right of the box and drag the image round clockwise so that the lines align at the join.



Commit the transformation by clicking the button with the tick on it on the toolbar. Then Layer->Flatten Image. You might sometimes need to tidy up the join with the clone tool, but that wasn't needed here.

Other transform options like skew and distort can also be used when appropriate.

The whole thing can be done in one minute after a little practice.

John

[Ped]

I shall practice

Ped