Tablet and Mobile

Archive for the ‘Panorama’ Category

The subject of panoramas has always fascinated me – as a kid (I’m now 58) my dad bought me a Pentax camera for Christmas and that was the start of a very long hobby lasting years and taking in DIY film developing, joining a local photo club and generally exploring photography – hell, I even made a pinhole camera and made up large sheets of photopaper from the silver chemicals – try asking for silver halides in Boots today and see what advice you get. I can even remember some of the names of the nasty chemicals which if requested now might land one in a jail for terrorists.

Still, that’s all history and we do this stuff digitally now. I’ve had various cameras over the years from the full-on multi-lens jobs – to using the iPhone – quite an extreme range.

Why would I even class the iPhone as a “camera”? Well, one over-riding reason for looking to take pictures with your phone – is convenience – it simply isn’t convenient to wander all over the place with a large block of aluminium strapped to your neck – especially when it’s hot unless you’re a REAL enthusiast – I find myself doing this less and less – and so without realising it my “proper” camera has been relegated to the background over the last year and I find myself more and more inclined to making the best out of the iPhone.

I should clarify I’m talking about iPhone 4, the earlier models were basically naff as cameras. I’d like to discuss the iPhone 4s but my contract says I’m stuck with the current model for many months yet…

I travel – and my wife Maureen and I have a little place in Spain which we use as often as possible – I love scenery – always have and Spain has it by the boatload – but I think you’ll agree, breath-taking scenes look great to the human eye but once you get them on camera they are often usually a disappointment – normal photos just cannot capture the awe of nature – well, most of the time anyway (Life on Earth/Frozen Planet etc excluded – as Attenborough’s stuff is just, well, stunning).

I think there’s a reason we’re all moving to widescreen TV. Humans tend to look left and right, not up and down – no doubt that’s why the ridiculously wide screen cinema format is so popular. It just “feels right” – and panoramic photos take us one step nearer to capturing the excitement of reality.

Of course – one can go all the way and take 360 degree panoramas – they are just STUNNING – but not cheap to do – take a look at these…amazing.  Better, given special lenses, it’s possible to take all-round VIDEO that lets you turn around and look at different angles in live video… all of this will be common-place some day as now doubt will 3d (I’m just waiting for Apple to realise the potential for putting 2 cameras on the back of an iPhone and record everything in 3d). I prefer something I can stick in a blog.

For now –and for general purpose – I’ve spent some time looking at Apps for the iPhone together where appropriate with some PC-based man-power to help make better pictures.

If you want to experiment at making your own panoramas on the iPhone, I suggest you go grab the free Microsoft Photosynth and get out into the sunshine to have a play. Forget the fact it’s free – it’s brilliant. Look at the link I’ve sent on your PC – you’ll see lots of demos. The APP on the iPhone works a treat and creates pretty much seamless joins of separate images – even helping you to take them in succession.  It’s probably the best App to do the job.

What’s missing right now is a package that combines HDR and Panoramas – what do I mean by HDR? Well, the iPhone has HDR (high dynamic range) facilities – but they’re rubbish – the best I can suggest is that you get hold of the iPhone iCameraHDR app to see what I’m talking about.  Imagine taking a picture of scenery straight into the sun – it just doesn’t work – you get a white sun with no detail, or, if the camera is capable of stopping down, you get almost no detail in the scenery as the aperture has stopped down so much there’s not enough light coming in… you can’t have it all. Take a shot indoors with no special lighting – looking out of the window into bright light – you can have detail INSIDE the house or OUTSIDE – you can’t have both. The idea of the HDR apps is to take 2 or 3 different pictures, at different exposures and “merge” them together to try to get the best out of each.  It “kind of” works and the software can make the difference between a beautiful result or something that looks artificial and, well, crap.  How do we get around it as human beings with our own eyes?  Well, it’s not simple but our eyes do several things – as you look around a scene – your eyes adjust constantly – in a static photo that can’t happen – the whole thing has to be captured at once. Also the sensitivity of any part of your eye can change almost instantly – not as a whole – but individual parts (try staring at a coloured spotlight for a while and move away.. you’ll see the opposite colour because your eyes can de-sensitise even at the individual colour level). Again, cameras can’t do that – and to be honest the result if they could, might look a mess.

So one way around this is to use an HDR App to take several HDR pictures and then use software to stitch these together. It all gets a bit too much… and for PC editing there REALLY is not a lot out there to chose from – many packages are open source and frankly more hard work for less result.   But I have found ONE package, sadly the developers are not working hard on this – but it’s out there and available – Serif PanoramaPlus.  I’ve given you a YouTube link to their latest version but to be honest PanoramaPlus 3 is good enough if you can get it for under a tenner and there’s very little difference. Essentially what this package does is let you drag and drop any number of overlapping images into an area on the PC screen – press a button and…. you get your seamless panorama – and you know what – it just WORKS –  unless you’re really bad with a camera, no colour variation –it just produces absolutely excellent panoramas.

 

But here’s the thing – many panoramas suffer if there is movement because as the images overlap, which they must, if things move in those overlaps – you get a MESS… of course this can be fun – take 4 overlapping photos of a scene and have someone move to each of the areas before you take the shot. You can have all sorts of fun with this – the same person appearing several times in the shot.. but for some scenery it would be nice to think there is an easier way – and there is.  Take a video on your iPhone, grab some overlapping stills – bang them into PanoramaPlus – and there’s your panorama. It works well as long as there is no blurring of the stills in the video. Here’s an example..

The image above was taken in Spain – and covers over 180 degrees. I took a pan of the area with the iPhone  – and brought that image into my PC. I then used PicPICK to grab 4 stills from the video – and then dropped them into PanoramaPlus. All the panoramas BEFORE this (in this blog entry) were put together from stills. The PanoramaPlus is supposed to work with videos directly but it’ll not do iPhone videos hence the screen grabber. Any other method of grabbing stills will work just as well.

What about resolution you may ask?  If I told you that the original of that image you see above is nearly 6,000 pixels wide – is that high enough resolution? And yes, that was done with the iPhone 4 standard video camera.

That little outcrop of white buildings over to the left.. here there are at the original resolution. Not too shabby…

Here (below) is a screenshot of the PanoramaPlus software in action. Incidentally not only can you fire a bunch of left-right overlapping images – but up-down as well.  Standing in front of some great architecture, FAR too close to get the whole lot in one photo? No problem, take a bunch of overlapping photos and fire the lot in any order at this software and it will do the business for you. As you can imagine this is FAR, FAR more than simply overlapping some photos – the images have to be matched for colour and brightness and the software has to warp each image to make them “fit” as a whole – and somehow it DOES – usually in seconds, automatically, no intervention, no problem. I’ve taken 15 or more images of something and fired them into PanoramaPlus and it’s turned out a respectable result.

The software is DEAD easy to use and you have all sorts of control over the output – you can even generate panoramas ready to drop into a web page.  Check out the links I’ve given you and have fun experimenting. And yes, it’s CHEAP.

Here are a couple of other panoramas I made last year with this software (but using a standard SLR camera as I didn’t have the iPhone 4 at the time). Try clicking on these images to see higher-resolution versions….

Enjoy experimenting.