Hi everybody.

I was recently lucky to get an appointment with a Danish newspaper. I convinced them to give panoramas a try on their online part of the newspaper.

We agreed that I should make a panorama of the Parliamentary Chamber in Denmark.

I really want to impress them so that hopefully this one job will lead to many others in the future. I would therefore really like your help to make my panorama as good as possible. I would appreciate if you will take a look and advice me what I can do to improve the panorama. Do you see any flaws? Do you have suggestions on how to improve my panorama??

I know I can work a bit more on the windows as they are a bit bright, but what else is there to do?

You can see the panorama at www.wideeyes.dk/tours/fullscreen/folketinget.html

I used a nikon coolpix 8700 and fc e9 lense. I took 8 exposures at every 120 degree. I used Photomatix Pro 2.4 Highlights and shadows - Intensive to blend and then stitched with panoweaver 4. I saved and used PS7 to brush up the panorama and it is published with Pano2Qtvr.

I look forward to your response as I can use all the help I can get to improve.

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Best regards

Morten Andersen
- a newbie trying to improve

Morten,

I like your pano, at first I thought some spots far away were out of focus, then I re-read the post and saw Photomatrix. While I love Photo matrix and the HDR concept in general I get the same thing when I use it. I'm not sure if its because we use the same lens or what, but it seems like the backs of the chairs and the microphones in the distance are blurry. Have you tried it with one of your good exposures, I mean tried it without Photomatrix? Does it get sharper?

While I think the pano looks nice, it seems like your pushing yourself to get better at it. Ill bet if you did a quick lesson with our resident expert the Smoothmiester you two could spruce this thing up in no time.

Morten, the balcony and the windows behind it as well as the lamps and other parts of that half of the pano look double exposed to me. A stitching issue,maybe
Good luck, as this job seems to be promissing.

Regards, Martin

Hi everybody.

Thank you to all of you that have taken the time to look at is and reply. I really appreciate your help.

I know some of the stuff you mention. I know I still have to work with the windows. I know how to improve that.

But I do not know how to correct the blurry / unsharp parts of the image. Eg the michrophones. I have had some misalignment problems. I then inserteded additional matching points and that helped a lot.

I am unsure how to improve further. I think that my main problem is the limitation in my equipment.

Yes I will definately turn to smooth for a couple of lessons. I have also told him that, but it will have to waint untill I get my new equipment (canon 5D and sigma 8mm)

The good thing is that I got the gig by showing them this panorama: http://www.wideeyes.dk/tours/fullscreen/poolsilkeborg.html 

I think that the new panorama is an improvements compared to the "older" one.

The final panorama will contain serveral hotspots describing where the different parties are sitting.

I also got an other advice from some one else that I should start learning to do hand held panoramas. Then I could do "action" panoramas - and hopefully get a lot more assigments.

Best regards

Morten Andersen

morten..nice project

if you go to smooth for tutorial,, ask him to help you make the pano load fast!

i've seen his full screen panos load super fast.  yours took some time to load

if you're using photomatrix i dont know why your windows are still blown out.

try photoshop. put the best pano with the white windows at the top. then put the best pano with the NICE blue sky windows below.  then start erasing the windows from the top pano (white windows) so that the blue sky windows show.

you might want to try different % on the eraser tool in photoshop. 360texas has a window tutorial here and there are others online.

Hi guys

So I ended up going back to the Parlimentary Chamber to re-shoot it.

The panorama is beeing used to show where all the different parties are sitting. In the previous panorama you were not able to see the chairs in the back so it was actually useless even though I was proud of it.

I got up on the table and up on a box, so the camera was about 2,3 meters up. The result is here: http://www.wideeyes.dk/tours/fullscreen/folketinget1.html 

Now I have an other question. As mentioned the panorama is to be used to show where the different parties are sitting. I therefore have to make serveral hotspots in the panorama (probably using TW2) that the viewers can click to get information about the different parties.

I want to draw inside the panorama to show wich chairs belong to the different political parties. How do you suggest I do that?? Can it be done with the stitched image in photoshop? Or should I rather use PTEditor to extract partial views and then edit them?? Can it be done with a regular mouse or would I have to buy a tablet pen like this one  http://www.wacom.com/graphire/index.cfm ??

I would also appreciate any comments you might have on how to improve the new panorama.

Best regards

Morten

Morten,

Your image is still coming across dark & unsharp to me.  Perhaps when you change equipment that will improve.  Are you shooting in RAW format? If you're shooting in RAW you could adjust many variables to make the images look better.  I currently use a Canon EOS 5D with the Canon EF15mm Fisheye lens and am very pleased with the results.

Depending on how you want to do this.... you can convert your stitched image from a spherical to cubic in Panoweaver.  Save your converted image as a bmp or tiff and add any text information in photoshop.  Keep in mind this is only if you need to add FIXED information like naming of the seats, etc.  

You can bring the image back into Panoweaver and reconvert to a spherical.  This would cut back on the number of Hot Spots you have to add.

Good Luck!

Hi maxxnas

Thank you for your comments. Is it really dark to you?? At my computer it is perfectly luminated. Hmm perhaps I should take a look at my screen settings. I guess that is where I control the brigthness of the screen?

About the sharpnes there is not much I can do about it. I have bracketed and combined a lot of photos. But I have also tried to stitch just 3 images and the result is the same. I guess it is due to the equipment I am using.

Thanks again for the comments, they are highly appreciated.