Tips for panoramic stitching – Digital Photography Tip of the Week

Many of the software packages that come with digital camera’s as well as a lot of the photo editing software applications have features that let you stitch a series of images together to create a panoramic shot.

There are a few steps you want to take before hand though to be sure you have some successful shots to work with. One of the most important steps you can take is to make sure that you have turn off your auto white balance on your camera. This will ensure each image in the series has the same colour tone. We have a poor ability to remember similar colours but a very good ability to distinguish them side by side. Shooting your images with the same white balance will help to ensure this.

Similar to this, if you can set a manual exposure for the entire series of images, this too will help to ensure seamless images. Finally, try to keep the camera perpendicular to the ground. The will ensure that you will not have to needlessly crop your final image later. Of course this process can become more technical including finding the nodal point of your camera/lens combination and using special tripod heads but that is not for this blog.

Until next time, happy shooting.

Comments 2

  • Colour relationships
    Today’s post on RGB and CMYK failed to point out that RGB is additive colour, as in a TV or monitor screen – where we start with black, and then add the three primary colours to get “white”. And that CMYK represents subtractive colour, as used in printing. There we start with a white sheet containing something near the full spectrum and then apply translucent inks that act a filters, thus selecting the shades that show through. I believe this concept is an essential basic for any discussion on the two colour systems.

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