St Mary's Cathedral, Portland Oregon

[billjones]

http://rhmpano.com/rhm/stmarycathederal/

Canon 5d

The whole project is 82 megabytes (on-line) and the first scene is a 802 megapixel image (Ninja 5). Nothing has been reduced (except for the stained glass shots), everything was built at jpg level 12 (lossless)

The first scene as that was made from 135 separate shots at 28mm with a Canon 28-105 and Ninja 5. The remaining scenes were Sigma 8mm with a homemade collar attached to a light stand and hand rotated for 5 shots.

Feedback always welcome.

Bill Jones

[John Houghton]

This is an ambitious project that promises much when one enters the first panorama. Your introduction says "You can zoom in and out to enjoy the detail and resolution provided in the Main screens". Unfortunately, this encourages one to zoom in extremely close to get a really good view of all the faults that go largely unnoticed in more normal views. There are many stitching errors, noise, chromatic aberration, purple fringing etc. to be seen, as well as tripods! I think it would be wise to place realistic limits on the amount of zoom that can be used. I also find the animated hotspots annoyingly intrusive, and some of the panos need levelling. In short, I don't think there's been sufficient attention to detail, but of course most visitors to the site will not notice the minor imperfections and will be suitably impressed by what they see.

John

[billjones]

Thank you.

[billjones]

I have made a few changes and also restitched all of the images. It's getting there. The first link in the t hread will always go to the current project.

[John Houghton]

You seem to have got the format of the initial panorama wrong: at the top and bottom, the straight line features have developed a nasty bulge. Probably you are using Autopano Pro and have not generated a full 360x180 equirectangular image. I don't use that program myself, but I think the latest versions have an option to not automatically crop the output when there are holes at the zenith and nadir. It's essential to do this rather than extending the canvas of the cropped image, as the cropping may not be symmetrical and you end up with the horizon in the wrong place.

John

[billjones]

Two of the pano's are 360x128 and I had the FOV set to 100 in autotour to limit the display, I reset it to 128 and no bulge, just an empty nadar. I will look at the xml files and see where I can limit the movement without creating the bulge. Thanks.

[billjones]

Got it fixed, found out where to change the max and min 'tilt' in the xml files. I was causing a forced distortion by trying to control the tilt range by defining a smaller FOV in autotour. After awhile the pieces start falling into place.

[Civoksay]

Very nice job Bill!

I've been to St Mary's cathedral, this is like visiting there again.

Yeah, I do see very little imperfections here and there, but they're only noticeable fully zoomed in. Most people, especially those unintroduced to panoramic photography, won't notice anything amiss. Color fringing is unavoidable when using an 8mm fisheye, but it can be almost completely eliminated if you run your shots through photoshop. My only gripe is you can't look all the way up to the ceiling, but I'm not sure if it's just the viewer program limiting this function.

Great work!

[billjones]

when I did the 24mm shots I tilted at 30 degrees instead of 45, live and learn. With the 8mm I just couldn't get the cieling to stitch correctly so I set the max tilt to just not go there. Thanks for the comments and advice. I do use photoshop so how would you have eliminated the fringing?

[Civoksay]

Taking out the fringing is fast and easy, it takes a couple minutes to do. All you need is a basic knowlege of layer masks and a version of Photoshop that supports "Camera Raw" - Photoshop CS3, CS4, or Adobe elements 6.0/7.0:

1. Load your stitched 360 degree panorama photo into Photoshop's "Camera Raw" window. If you need, set the file handling preferences in the "edit" pull down menu so that Adobe will prefer "Camera Raw" for JPG files.

2. Once loaded in "Camera Raw", click the "HSL/Grayscale" tab on the right hand side. set reds, purples, and magentas saturation to zero. The fringes will dissapear, but similar colors on the rest of the photo will become dull. This can be fixed in step 3.


3. Now load both the original photo and the defringed photo from "Camera Raw" into Photoshop as layers. Using a "hide all" layer mask, brush in the defringed areas over the layer of the original photo. Last, merge the layers. You'll now have defringed photos with original colors intact:


Hope this helps,

This may seem like a lot of steps, but once you get proficient at this it doesn't take much time at all.
There's also a program called "DxO Pro" that can take out fringing automatically based on downloadable presets for the lenses you use. It's instant results, but not as accurate as the hands-on approach above.

-Nick

[John Houghton]

With the 8mm I just couldn't get the cieling to stitch correctly so I set the max tilt to just not go there.

Perhaps the no-parallax point hasn't been set correctly with your home made collar, though with the ceiling generally relatively far away, parallax ought not to be a big problem. Which stitcher are you using?

John

[billjones]

all of them, different ones work better on some pano's then others, especially the fisheye shots. This one was autopano or ptgui.