David,
I saw it done on Tech TV back New Years…
I didn’t see that show. Perhaps someone else did, or knows the answer. Although I don’t have Photostitch, I do quite a few panoramic stitches, using other image stitchers. Perspective distortions similar to what you describe are a common complication of stitching multiple photos. I can usually solve the problem in the image stitcher itself. I use Photoshop mainly to fine crop stitched panoramas and do other image improvements, and to print them.
You can do simple perspective corrections in Photoshop but the kind of perspective problems that can arise from stitching multiple images can go beyond what you might call simple. For them I might consider investing in a third party solution such as Human Software’s Squizz:
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http://www.humansoftware.com/pages1200/Squizz/HSsquizz11.htm l>
Squizz gives you several ways to distort an image while maintaining good control of exactly how it is done. I don’t think that even Photoshop CS can match the capability of Squizz.
— Burton — (not associated with Human Software or Squizz)
Thank you, I will look into this program.
Yes, it was a very cool show on New Years day. The main host of Screen Savers had a Photoshop expert on showing tips and new tricks of Photoshop CS.
David
David,
If you could post an example of a stitched image with the corners that need to be fixed, perhaps we could suggest Photoshop techniques that might solve the problem. You could compress it quite a bit as a JPEG to make it readily downloadable. Hopefully we would ignore the JPEG artifacts and concentrate on the image distortion.
Also, if you could post the individual images before they were stitched, we could try different stitching techniques that might avoid the problem.
— Burton —
There is an article about this that you may find useful in the current issue of Photoshop User magazine.
Edit: Interesting that the spell checker for this forum flags "Photoshop" as a misspelling.
OK,
Thanks for your help.
Here is one in a series of sunset images that I would love to unbend the corners on. Yes, this is a desert sunset. This one in particular looks like a dragon swooping down in the distance.
<
http://davidbales.hypermart.net/images/Temp/sunset_nov17.jpg>
As you can see, both corners on this one significantly dip up.
David
Albuq, NM
Whoops, and no, I don’t believe I have the original photos. Unfortunately.
David
David,
As you can see, both corners on this one significantly dip up.
Yes, that kind of distortion is common and can be avoided in the image stitching process by the stitching software. However, Human Software’s Squizz could easily straighten that horizon after the stitching is done.
It’s a little better to do it in the image stitcher because it is probable that the real horizon isn’t exactly straight and while you are looking at the separate photos you can better estimate where the "straight" horizon should fall with respect to the apparent horizon.
So just slapping a grid on it in Squizz and straightening the apparent horizon to a perfect straight line wouldn’t be proper either. You probably want the apparent horizon to be a bit non-straight to reflect reality. In Squizz you would have to "eyeball" where the straightline part of the horizon should go with respect to the apparent horizon. By "apparent horizon" I mean the edge where the dark landmass meets the light sky.
If you are going to be doing a lot of stitches to create panoramas or such, you might want to consider investing in a better image stitcher. However, the best image stitcher (RealViz) is expensive, so you would need to use it a lot to justify the cost. There are some reasonably capable mid-priced stitchers.
— Burton —
Thanks Burton.
What I did was continue my search of the Screen Savers site and I found a tip embedded knee-deep in links. It suggested two plugins. I got Andromeda LensDoc Filter and it worked fantastic. I was able to unbend all of my panoramic photos using this tool.
Thank you,
David
Albuq, NM
David,
I noticed a feature in Photoshop 7 that I haven’t used yet that might also unbend your panoramics. Take a look at Filter> Distort> Shear. It lets you draw a curved line, that can even be an S-curve if you like, that distorts your image according to the shape of the curve. I think that by fiddling with it a bit you could unbend a bent panorama. However, I think LensDoc provides a better interface for straightening a bent image. And it is also very good for what it was designed to do, namely remove lens distortions.
— Burton —
david,
go to www.tawbaware.com for an inexpensive stitching software, ptassembler, and you will not have to make any adjustments with other programs. the tutorials are great and the learning curve not very difficult. Also check out the gigapixel image located there.
jv
I am a PS Elements user, and it has a tool called Photomerge which I have used to successfully merge several panoramas. It has a correction feature called "Cylindrical" which corrects perspective, I think, on very wide panos. The image still curves at the ends, so I just crop the largest rectangle I can get. The results seem pretty good to me, but maybe my criteria are not very stringent…
Bert
PS – I’ll be out of town for a few days. If anybody would like to see any of my pano attempts, I would be happy to post them when I return.
Thanks Bert,
I did see that Elements II had that feature. I may consider that as an option in the future for new shots, but the ones that I had problems with, had already been stitched and I didn’t have the original photos.
thanks for the tip.
David
Help! I have searched the forum but no step by step on how to stitch photos with PS 7.0. I have some great shots that I thought I could use 7.0 to stitch but can’t find anything. Help
means42,
I don’t think PS 7.0 has the pano stitch feature that is in PS Elements. I am not a 7.0 user, but I have heard comments from others about this, I think. Hopefully, someone else will confirm this…
Bert
It does not.
The Elements plugin files work fine in it, though 🙂
M
Are you interested in using Displace to fix it?
I can serve it up no prob.
I´d like to double the recommendation for PTAssembler. It really is very classy software, sold very cheap. You wont have problems like this.
Mathias
