No panoramas found - Force manual panorama stitching?

[exocore]

Hi all,

I am trying to create a HDR panoramic image from a sunset at the see as shown below:

(8 HDR images to be combined, each at 50% oppacity)

What I did so far:

1. Took images and enjoyed the sunset 🙂
   I used fixed, manual settings for focus and exposure time across all images and took three different exposures for each shot. The images were taken by hand, as tripod would have been useless on a boat anyway...
2. Created my own HDR setting and saved them as a preset
3. Developed eight individual HDR images and saved them as 32-bit *.tiff files (can I somehow automate this using batch-processing?)
4. Selected "New panorama" and imported my images.

At this point I am getting an error saying "No panoramas found". Even if I try to merge only two frames it will already fail...

Now I fully get that the software has a pretty hard time in finding correspondences across the images, as half of the photos are waves that always look different, while the sky doesn't provide any features at all. On the other hand, merging the images manually is super easy based on the mountain silhouette at the horizon as you can see above. So my question is: Can I somehow force Affinity Photo into opening the images and letting me arrange them manually?

As I am new to the software I'm also happy about any recommendations regarding my workflow. E.g. by developing the HDR images front up, I'm now having different brightness levels in all recordings, so merging them without the panorama rendering functionality would be a pain in the a**... However, it seems there is no direct support for HDR panoramas so far, is there?

[PaulEC]

Create a new document the size of the full panorama (or a bit bigger then crop to final size later). Arrange the images in the correct order. Manually align them, then “blend” them using clone/retouching tools, masks etc. 

[exocore]

33 minutes ago, PaulEC said:

Create a new document the size of the full panorama (or a bit bigger then crop to final size later). Arrange the images in the correct order. Manually align them, then “blend” them using clone/retouching tools, masks etc. 

That's exactly the kind of work I'm trying to avoid...

2 hours ago, exocore said:

[...] by developing the HDR images front up, I'm now having different brightness levels in all recordings, so merging them without the panorama rendering functionality would be a pain in the a**...

 

[Old Bruce]

3 hours ago, exocore said:

Developed eight individual HDR images and saved them as 32-bit *.tiff files (can I somehow automate this using batch-processing?)

I am not at all certain we can use 32 bit files for a panorama. I could very well be wrong though. 

[stuck]

3 hours ago, exocore said:

...trying to create a HDR panoramic image...

If Photo can't do it, then Hugin might be able to do it:

https://hugin.sourceforge.io/

[PaulEC]

I appreciate it’s a pita, but if the images don’t have enough unique content for them to be turned into a panorama automatically, there isn’t a lot of choice. There may be other software that can cope with these type of images automatically, so maybe someone else can suggest a better way of doing it.

[exocore]

So, after all I ended up using a Linux PC with good old Autopano Giga. I forced it to include all images in a single panorama, roughly aligned them by hand, then limited the control points to the mountains at the horizon and run another fast alignment optimization.

Finally I rendered everything into a *.hdr panorama and did the tonemapping using Affinity Photo:

Unfortunately, I didn't manage to get Autopano to run stable on my new Apple silicon Macbook, so I'm still looking for some alternative in the long run...

[stuck]

19 hours ago, exocore said:

I'm still looking for some alternative in the long run...

Did you look at Hugin?  It's free and has a Mac version:

https://hugin.sourceforge.io/download/