Digital Camera World » panorama

World’s Largest Photo: 4 Canon 7D cameras, 48,640 frames, 320 gigapixels

jmeyer — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 11:51:17 +0000

The world’s largest photo – an amazing 320-gigapixel picture of London taken from the top of the BT Tower – has been produced using just four Canon EOS 7D cameras.

The stunning 360-degree view of London was taken by photographic firm 360Cities and comprises 48,640 individual frames shot on the four Canon 7D cameras, mounted with EF 400mm f/2.8L IS II USM lenses and Extender EF 2x III teleconverters, provided by Canon.

The cameras were driven by high end Rodeon VR Head ST robotic panorama heads, from the Clauss company in Germany.

The 48,640 individual images were shot after the conclusion of the 2012 Olympic Games in London and were then stitched together into a single, giant panorama over a period of weeks. In total, the project took a period of several months.

According to organisers, if the image was printed at normal photographic resolution, the panorama would be 98 meters across and 24 meters tall – nearly as big as Buckingham Palace!

Rainer Fuehres, Head of Consumer Imaging Group, Canon Europe, said: “The goal of empowering people to take the next step on their personal photographic journeys drives every product we create, and this breath-taking image truly takes this philosophy to the extreme.

“Since its launch, the EOS 7D has caught the imagination of enthusiasts around the world so we were pleased to support such an exciting and challenging project with a camera that so many people are using to capture their own moments of inspiration.”

The project in numbers

Project by numbers:
• 320 – the number of gigapixels in the photo
• 48,640 – the number of individual images shot
• 3 – the number of days it took to shoot all the individual photos
• 3 – the number of months over which the computer processed the final result
• 60,000 – times bigger than an iPhone 4 photo
• 98 – the number of meters long if printed in normal photographic resolution
• 24 – the number of meters high if printed in normal photographic resolution
• 29th – The floor at the BT Tower where the photos were taken
• 20 – number of miles distant to the viewable horizon

Technical photographic information, and how the photo was taken:
• Working over a period of three chilly days in 2012, the 360Cities team spent hours on the 29th floor outdoor platform of the BT Tower working with four cameras to record the 48,640 images comprising the panorama.
• Four Canon EOS 7D cameras with EF 400mm f/2.8L IS II USM lenses and Extender EF 2x III teleconverters were mounted on Clauss company Rodeon VR Head ST robotic panorama heads and positioned in four secure locations around the 29th floor platform.
• The Clauss company robotic panorama heads are capable of 72,000 steps in a single 360 degree arc, and in this case were set to fire four frames a second.
• Laptops monitored a live preview of the progress of the shoot, which was accomplished in the teeth of sub-freezing temperatures and occasional 50 mph winds high above London.
• The 360Cities photography team of Jeffrey Martin, Tom Mills and Holger Schulze ensured that not a single individual frame from the more than 48,000 planned was missed.
• The raw images were then processed over a multi-week period using Fujitsu Technology Solutions’ Celsius R920 workstationwith 256GB of RAM and 16 cores at 3.1GHz, and Autopano Giga panorama stitching software from Kolor.
• The resulting online interactive version of the photo is presented in multi-layered, tiled resolution that permits zooming in to view extreme details, and is composed of millions of individual image tiles.

Create a 360° panorama in Photoshop Elements

jmeyer — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 10:00:50 +0000

When on location, your peripheral vision tends to give you a much wider perspective than your camera’s lens, which is why landscape shots often lack the sense of space you experienced at the scene. Here, we’ll show you how to use Photoshop Elements’ picture-stitching powers to combine six shots into a 360° panorama composite that reveals much more about the location. We’ll also show you how to adjust the image to get a more balanced composition, which is especially important when creating an architectural 360° panorama.

We’ll explain how to batch-process our raw source files to reveal more tonal detail and boost the colours. By shooting in raw you have more information to work with, but as older computers may struggle to stitch such large images together, we’ll also show you how to resize the source images’ dimensions to something more manageable.

Once your source files are looking their best and are at a suitable size, we’ll show you the optimum settings to use in Photoshop Elements’ clever Photomerge command to create a cylindrical 360° panorama that will start and end at the same point, without any visible seams.

You can then share your amazing panoramas with friends and family, or you can go one step further and follow our bonus technique to turn your panorama into an interactive QuickTime Virtual Reality (QTVR) movie that people can explore themselves, as if on location.

All you’ll need for this Photoshop tutorial is Photoshop Elements 9 or higher, and about 20 minutes. Here’s how to do it…

Step 1 Open the images
Open Photoshop Elements in Full Edit mode. Go to File>Open and browse the ‘before’ images you want to merge together. In this tutorial we selected 6 images, then clicked Open. They’re all raw files, so they’ll open up in Adobe Camera Raw.

Step 2 Look for clipping
Click on your first ‘before’ image. Press O to turn the highlight clipping warning on. Red patches will reveal over-exposed highlights that will lack detail in print. By dragging the Recovery slider to 70 you can reduce the spread of the clipping warning and reveal more sky detail. Set the Recovery slider to 0 for now.

Step 3 Batch edit
Each before file we used in this tutorial was captured using Manual settings of 1/125 sec at f/11, so they will  all benefit from the same Recovery adjustment. Tick Select All in the raw editor’s panel, then we drag Recovery to 70 to apply that edit to every ‘before’ shot.

Step 4 Boost colour
Each thumbnail will feature an exclamation mark while it is being processed. Once highlight detail has been recovered, a file’s exclamation mark will vanish and its thumbnail will update. Push Vibrance  up to +55 to boost the strength of the shots’ colours.

Step 5 Open the images
Once you’ve finished batch-processing the before files’ colours and tones, click Open Images to take them into Photoshop Elements’ standard editor. These 12MP images could take ages for the Photomerge command to process, so you’ll need to resize them to more manageable proportions.

Step 6 Resize multiple files
Go to File>Process Multiple Files and tick Resize Images. Set Width to 15cm and Resolution to 200. The command will automatically constrain the Height. In Destination, tick Browse. Create a new folder on your desktop – we called ours Panorama_before (low res). Untick any caption options to avoid adding text labels.

Step 7 Choose a layout
When you click OK, the files will be resized, saved and then closed. Go to File>New>Photomerge Panorama. The Photomerge command window will appear. Tick the Cylindrical option so that the end of the stitched panorama will blend with the start.

Step 8 Blend the images
Click on Browse and locate the Panorama_before (low res) folder that you created in step 6. Shift-click to select the six smaller source files and click Open. The files will appear as a list in the Source Files field. Tick Blend Images, then click OK.

Step 9 Create your panorama
Photomerge will now automatically create a new wide canvas and place each shot onto a separate layer. Photomerge will reposition each shot so that its edges overlap and align with the others. Click No when asked if you want to automatically fill the edges.

Step 10 Crop the shot
Go to Layer>Merge Layers. Grab the Crop tool and crop the shot to remove any transparent edges while preserving as much sky as possible. Lose the railing spike on the left, but include it at the right. This will ensure that you have a full 360° image.

Step 11 Spot the join
Go to Filter>Other>Offset. Ensure Wrap Around and Preview are ticked. Set the Horizontal field to ‘-300 pixels right’. This creates a more balanced composition, but you can see where the two ends join, so you’ll need to tidy up with some cloning.

Step 12 Hide the seam
Grab the Clone Stamp tool and create a new layer (Layer>New Layer). Tick Sample All Layers and choose a soft brush tip. Alt-click to sample grass or sky adjacent to the seam, then spray to extend over the seam to hide it. Sample and extend bits of railing .

Shoot and stitch panoramic photos in 8 easy steps

jmeyer — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 07:00:45 +0000

Panoramic photos are a great way to showcase sweeping landscapes. By shooting a series of overlapping images and combining them on your computer, you can take in a much wider angle of view. This technique also means you don’t need an expensive wide-angle lens – your 18-55mm standard lens is fine.

This photo stitching technique is much better than taking a wide-angle shot and simply cropping it because it produces a picture with a much higher resolution. Stitching photos together in this way might sound complicated, but it’s not. All you need is a tripod and Photoshop Elements or higher. We’ve used Elements because it has a Photomerge Panorama tool that makes stitching photos really easy.

If you’ve ever tried lining up panoramic photos manually, you’ll know there are all sorts of issues with perspective and distortion. Thankfully, Photomerge resolves these problems for you, producing seamless panoramas automatically. You may need to crop off a few untidy edges, but the process needn’t take more than a few minutes.

There are two stages to creating panoramic images. The first is to take the series of overlapping shots that are going to be stitched together in Elements. This is the most important phase because Photoshop needs the right raw materials to work with. If your starting shots are misaligned or show colour or brightness shifts, the final panorama will look odd. The second stage is to stitch the images together in Elements. This is straightforward, though you’ll need to pay attention to the initial settings.

How to shoot and stitch panoramic photos

01 Get your tripod level
First, you need to get your tripod level. You can check this by loosening the horizontal pan axis and rotating the camera as you look through the viewfinder. You need to make sure the horizon stays level from one side of your planned panorama to the other. Alternatively, if your tripod has a spirit level built into the base, you can use that.

02 Switch to manual
Now switch everything to manual. In everyday photography, it doesn’t matter too much if the camera changes the colour balance or focus settings between shots. Here, it’s critical that the settings are identical for each frame. If they aren’t, you might get unwanted colour and brightness shifts across the panorama when it’s stitched together.

03 Play with settings
Choose a small aperture, then pan the camera across the scene, adjusting the shutter speed while checking the exposure indicator to find a good overall exposure. Pay attention to the sky to avoid burned-out areas. Now pick a Manual White Balance preset, such as Direct Sunlight.

04 Focus manually
Use autofocus to focus on your subject, then slide the switch on the side of the lens to focus manually. Make sure you don’t just turn the focus ring as far as it will go and assume that’s infinity – some lenses will actually focus past infinity.

05 Shoot your frames
Take a shot at the left end of your panorama. Make a mental note of what’s at the right-hand edge of the picture. Now pan to the right. Stop when the detail you’ve committed to memory is about a third of the way from the left-hand side, then take another shot. Repeat for three or four frames.

06 Launch Photomerge
On your computer, launch Elements, open all the shots in your sequence and select File > New > Photomerge Panorama. In the full version of Photoshop, use File > Automate Photomerge. The process is the same from here on, as are the panorama options in the next step.

07 Pick your panorama
Under Source Files, click Add Open Files. On the left, in the Layout area, select Cylindrical. This creates the panorama inside a virtual cylinder, which is best for landscapes. The Auto and Perspective options are more optically correct but create a ‘bow tie’ shape that requires a lot of cropping.

08 Filling the edges
Photoshop Elements does an amazing job of correcting perspective and merging frames, but it will leave irregular blank spaces around the edges. Elements 10, though, can automatically fill in the problem areas using surrounding details. The alternative is to crop your panoramas manually.