2 Pro Sunrise over autumn fields

[Robert Prior]

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We finally had a day with clear skies and low winds, so I headed out to see if I could manage some decent sunrise pictures before the colours had completely vanished. The leaves weren’t very spectacular this year, but I was able to find a few red maples near Claremont.

You can see a larger view of this panorama here:

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This High Dynamic Range 360° aerial panorama was stitched from 130 bracketed photographs with PTGUI Pro, tone-mapped with Photomatix, processed with Colour Efex, and touched up in Affinity Photo and Aperture.

Original size: 25000 × 12500 (312.5 MP; 1.02 GB).

Location: Claremont, Ontario, Canada

 

[DMD Cine Attic]

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We finally had a day with clear skies and low winds, so I headed out to see if I could manage some decent sunrise pictures before the colours had completely vanished. The leaves weren’t very spectacular this year, but I was able to find a few red maples near Claremont.

You can see a larger view of this panorama here:

RoundMe ▷ A mobile app to watch sports in VR

Download the RoundMe app: Dive into the action and experience your matches fully immersed from your living room with Virtual Reality!

roundme.com

This High Dynamic Range 360° aerial panorama was stitched from 130 bracketed photographs with PTGUI Pro, tone-mapped with Photomatix, processed with Colour Efex, and touched up in Affinity Photo and Aperture.

Original size: 25000 × 12500 (312.5 MP; 1.02 GB).

Location: Claremont, Ontario, Canada

Impressive when viewed if full res, why does it have to be 130 images, bracketing for shadow/highlight detail ? Is large overlap required for better stitching job ? Never done one of those, just wondering why so many. Your feedback would be appreciated.

 

[Robert Prior]

Impressive when viewed if full res, why does it have to be 130 images, bracketing for shadow/highlight detail ? Is large overlap required for better stitching job ? Never done one of those, just wondering why so many. Your feedback would be appreciated.

It was four levels of exposure, two stops apart, each a full spherical panorama.

 

[DMD Cine Attic]

It was four levels of exposure, two stops apart, each a full spherical panorama.

I see, thank you, makes sense, looks like lots of work.

 

[Robert Prior]

I see, thank you, makes sense, looks like lots of work.

Doesn't seem like that much work — I like fiddling with pictures on my computer when the weather is bad

 

[Robert Prior]

Different rendering of the same panorama:

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[scro]

Is it just me, or are some of the exposures not fully aligned with others - see sample, below? It seems to be inconsistent across the panorama, so maybe slight distortions prevented perfect alignment across the image? Could the HDR merge be done pre-stitching?

 

[Robert Prior]

Is it just me, or are some of the exposures not fully aligned with others - see sample, below? It seems to be inconsistent across the panorama, so maybe slight distortions prevented perfect alignment across the image? Could the HDR merge be done pre-stitching?

View attachment 157232

Yeah, I didn't catch all the parallax errors that caused ghosting. I concentrated on the horizon, because that's where it's really noticeable.

The Mavic has some trouble maintaining an exact position for several minutes, especially when it's rotating to take the pano. This is worse in dim conditions (like this was). Wouldn't be a problem if the software could take four exposures spread 2 stops apart for each camera position. As it stands, the time different between exposures was a couple of minutes and the drone had done a full rotation, shifting position slightly while doing that.

 

[scro]

I've not tried a multi exposure hdr pano sphere yet but I can appreciate the challenges involved!

I guess some local misalignment could be corrected by rendering each exposure level as its own pano and then using photoshop's liquefy tool to push bits around on each individual exposure until they align. A lot of work though!

 

[Robert Prior]

I guess some local misalignment could be corrected by rendering each exposure level as its own pano

That's what I do. Also use control points between exposures to try to align them as much as possible, but sometimes there is just too much movement and I have to decide which errors to leave. I concentrate on the horizon and prominent objects (like the bright coloured trees) because errors there are obvious even without pixel peeping.

If I was making a print I'd get to work with the clone and inpainting brushes to reduce the errors you noticed, but while I like fiddling with pictures I don't like it that much.