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chip |
Standard Member
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United Kingdom
August-09-2008
43 Posts |
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Hi all not been on here for a while, after my first attempts at tours, I decided my kit was not up to the job (1 shot), my still photography needed mastering, and I needed to refine my use of lights and hdr,
so 5 months later I have achieved all the above and am now ready to get my tours up to scratch,
this is a stills gallery I did for an estate agent link
so you can decide if the above is bullsh1t ;-)
so bask to tours, done my first tour (this is a practice) I just used one of the downloadable expandable skins with TW4
I see very jagged lines when the tour is loading, this never happened in TW3, and depending how large i have my browser it is worse,
link to tour
taken on 40D + siggi 8mm, agnos head, PTGui, photoshop, 4 shots+1 top
any comments are welcome
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Vince |
Gold Member
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August-13-2007
194 Posts |
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Hi Chip,
Nice work. Why the "you can decide if the above is bullsh1"? Did you have a client complain? As for the tour, a lot of people have complained about the quality of the viewer in TW4, so it is not just you that has a problem.
Vince
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Rob63 |
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Gold Member
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United States
January-30-2007
200 Posts |
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Excellent work. The jagged lines are a function of the flash viewer that Easypano has yet to fix - I think in the opinion of a lot of the users of TW 4. There has been a fair amount of negative feedback about he quality of the images as the viewer rotates. Easypano says they are working on it, at least as of early last month. I wish the images could look as good as if they were published in Quicktime format. That's a far superior image viewer, in my opinion. I like all of the bells and whistles in TW 4, but the image quality is still troublesome.
Rob
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Rob63 |
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Gold Member
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United States
January-30-2007
200 Posts |
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What size are your images and how large are the image files? Just curious what you are ending up with after post production.
Thanks,
Rob
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smooth |
Forum Moderator
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Australia
November-23-2002
5401 Posts |
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Hi Chip,
Great to see your progress and nice of you to drop in and show us your work.
Your panoramas suffer quite badly from Chromatic Aberration and would be greatly improved if you were to sort this out in your RAW processing. Chromatic Aberration is "Colour Shift" and when looking at your panoramas you can clearly see the red channel is offset causing a magenta/red hue/shadow off many things like the building, window frames and outdoor seating etc.
Also some stitching errors and the tripod needs capping or removing. But all in all, not bad at all.
Your stills look great but the HDR work with moving objects is obvious.
Regards, Smooth
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chip |
Standard Member
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United Kingdom
August-09-2008
43 Posts |
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Hi all thx for the comments
looks like I will just have to wait till they sort out the problem, how much did this cost me lol
Smooth, as you point out I still need to improve my tours, I am not sure how to cap the tripod, so any pointers there would be helpful, using, PTGui and photoshop cs3, it would be nice to add a logo
I am just about to take delivery of a new camera 5DmkII as this will be FF with the 8mm I have will need less shots, so I was going to wait to get my raw work flow sorted, does anybody use FF and 8mm? and if so how many shots do you take?
thx again for the comments
Steve
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smooth |
Forum Moderator
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Australia
November-23-2002
5401 Posts |
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Hi Steve,
You can add a tripod cap with Panoweaver software easily. But seeing you are using PTGui for the stitching you will need an alternate method. The easiest way will be to convert the equirectangular image to cube faces and simply edit the Nadir in Photoshop. Again Panoweaver can convert a spherical image to cube faces. Alternate software for doing this would be Pano2QTVR which has a "free" version. Also you can look at Runes free spherical to cubic Photoshop plug-in
Personally I like the "Patch" option within the Pro version of Pano2VR because it retains 16 bit all the way through.
I use a FF Canon 5D and Sigma 8mm Fisheye. You will need 3 shots (120 degrees apart) with the option to shoot zenith and nadir shots. The best trick with this combination is to tilt the camera/lens up 5 degrees and shoot your 3 images in rotation. By doing this, it will close the hole/star in the zenith meaning you will not need to shoot a separate zenith/up shot. This will though open the hole at the nadir. This of course doesn't matter because you will patch/clone or cap this region.
Hope this is clear advise.
Regards, Smooth
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chip |
Standard Member
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United Kingdom
August-09-2008
43 Posts |
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hi again
thx Smooth the runes plugin works a treat, just need to make an action to speed up the process
adding the 5th zenith shot realy increases the work in PTGui, as I have to add control points from the zenith to all the other shots, and the resulting stitch has more errors,
I have just re stitched one of the offending tours just using the 4 shots (without the zenith) and my time in PTGui was more than halved and with a better stitch,
If I can use just 3 shots on the 5DmkII hopefully I can keep the post process down,
the Chromatic Aberration is a feature of the lens, how do you normally control this? I use lightroom 2 to process my raw files, to get rid of the nastiest in the above picture, I need to set red/cyan to -70 and blue/magenta to +70, is this normal?
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smooth |
Forum Moderator
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Australia
November-23-2002
5401 Posts |
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Hi Steve,
-70, +70 doesn't sound right. What version of the Sigma 8mm Fisheye do you have?
You control the Chromatic Aberration in Lightroom the same as I would in Adobe Camera Raw. (Trust your eyesight!) With the f/3.5 Sigma 8mm typical setting might be -38, +17 but images can differ. (There is no magic setting, you have to look and adjust to get the most from your images).
You should try shooting 4 images in rotation with your Canon 40D/Sigma 8mm combo with 5 degree tilt up. You will not need a zenith shot ever again if you have set the NPP correctly.
Regards, Smooth
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chip |
Standard Member
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United Kingdom
August-09-2008
43 Posts |
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its the latest version, its only a few months old,
most of the shots have very little CA, and a much reduced setting sorts them out, just this one needed a lot more ? but there was very strong sunlight.
my work flow being efficient is quite important, I cant have 10 tours taking me 2 days to post process, I think I am getting it down now, the biggest factor is getting rid of the zenith shot, and sorting out batch processing and actions,
file sizes, I am outputting at about 3000px wide and around 800k, is this the norm?
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