Panoramas....skies and other featureless aspects

[Bololoco]

I've been having problems with panorama stitching and hope someone out there knows of a solution.

Affinity seems to have no problem stitching together most panoramas i've fed into it, however, i'm having problems with skies, especially grey cloudy skies as well as clear blue ones. 

Currently, it just seems to disgard them, leaving large areas of nothing. I know I can infill but on my old computer, this takes way too long and doesn't always work as intended.

Can anyone give me tips on how I can patch together these more nebulous parts of my panoramas? I'm trying to make these panoramas as vast and detailed as possible, so extending the sky is essential.

[PaulEC]

The problem with skies and clouds is that they often move between exposures and/or don't have enough distinct matching features for successful stitching. (There's a similar problem with water and waves.) You could try manually lining up the images and using cloning and inpainting tools to cover any areas that don't match up.

[Bololoco]

7 hours ago, PaulEC said:

The problem with skies and clouds is that they often move between exposures and/or don't have enough distinct matching features for successful stitching. (There's a similar problem with water and waves.) You could try manually lining up the images and using cloning and inpainting tools to cover any areas that don't match up.

Indeed. That's why the title of this thread is as it is.

I've not had too much luck manually stitching pics. I suppose I should spend some time learning that skill. Do you know any tips and tricks to get things to match up accurately? 

I shot a sky panorama yesterday evening and Affinity just didn't bother with most of it. It would be good if you were given the option to manually add pics that weren't used in the stitching process and there's been quite a few times where it's missed the stitch (probably because the overlap is too small) but I can see it.

I'd also like to know how to enlarge the canvas to manually stitch things after pressing apply

[loukash]

11 hours ago, Bololoco said:

Can anyone give me tips on how I can patch together these more nebulous parts of my panoramas?

I haven't much experience with "real world" panoramas, but I'm stitching tons of scans of LP cover artworks which require at least four passes on a standard ±A4 scanner. There are always LP covers which can be hard to stitch because they lack any structure; think the "white album" by the Beatles as a well known example off the top of my head.

One trick that often works is to stitch only 2 images at a time, save as TIFF, then stitch the two pairs separately. That will work most of the time for me.

Some really stubborn covers can be aligned manually. The trick is to set the blend modes temporarily to Difference. Then you may need to mask the edges with a soft brush along the area where the overlapping images match the best.

[loukash]

1 hour ago, Bololoco said:

I'd also like to know how to enlarge the canvas to manually stitch things after pressing apply

Document menu → Resize Canvas
While applying the Panorama edit is a destructive process, the regular APh canvas is non-destructive by default.

[firstdefence]

Actually I might test Affinity today re panorama's as the sky is grey with moving cloud to see how it copes. Watch this space...

[Bololoco]

It's not an easy one to figure out so I await your findings and hope that some pointers can be made.

[firstdefence]

Ok I tried to take fairly dull sky panorama but the issues you are having didn't appear for me.

I did take 7 images for this stitch but the clouds were fast moving and the light was fading fast so it was a lay-by rush job, I did a manual exposure hand held of 1/90th f8 ISO1000
Ned Stark Winterfells Back Garden - Winters coming.

 

[Bololoco]

On 12/10/2023 at 8:58 PM, firstdefence said:

Ok I tried to take fairly dull sky panorama but the issues you are having didn't appear for me.

I did take 7 images for this stitch but the clouds were fast moving and the light was fading fast so it was a lay-by rush job, I did a manual exposure hand held of 1/90th f8 ISO1000
 

When you say you took 7 images, were any of those images purely of the sky without a visible horizon?

I can stitch together pictures that contain something definite, such as the brow of a hill but it generally fails when it is only sky or cloud.

[firstdefence]

4 hours ago, Bololoco said:

When you say you took 7 images, were any of those images purely of the sky without a visible horizon?

I can stitch together pictures that contain something definite, such as the brow of a hill but it generally fails when it is only sky or cloud.

Hi, no they had sky and foreground, I'll take a grid panorama tomorrow and have another go.