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How to tell AP the images belong to ONE panorama?


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Hi Affinity team,

 

I shot a panorama of four RAW files making up for one panorama. All of them are deliberately underexposed to preserve the sky details -and they have somewhat different exposure time because some of them are shot against the rising sun.. Shouldn't be a big deal to compensate this - they are ISO 200 RAW files after all.

 

When I import them with the "New panorama" wizard, AP wants to create 2 panoramas of two images each, obviously not recognizing the four belong together. (All images do overlap significantly.)

 

Anything I can do to convince AP to create one panorama from all four?

 

... apart from possibly tone mapping them separately (thus correcting for the different exposure) and trying to stitch the resulting JPGs, which is rather cumbersome.

 

Matthias.

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Hi Matthias,

 

When I do panos I always pre-process the RAWs first (Inc. lens corrections), not sure I'd call it cumbersome given the exposure variances that can be required to be balanced from multiple shots. I do use a different RAW editor though which maybe makes the flow seem a bit more logical than coming in and out of the same program.

With balanced exposures I've found stitching in AP to be very good to the point I haven't needed to use PTGui since getting AP

 

Regards

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Hi harrym,

 

I have now processed the images with Adobe CameraRaw (somewhat compensating the differing exposures), and then saved them to JPGs, which I stitched using the "good old" PanoramaFactory.

 

The point is that AP - if it worked as intended - could give me a seamless HDR panorama workflow where I can stitch HDR images and tone-map the whole panorama later - instead of restricting myself to 8 bit input.

 

If I cannot achieve this, then there is no point at all in using Affinity Photo for panoramas for me, because as a pure JPG stitching software it is comfortable but not accurate enough for my liking. In PanoramaFactory  for example the user has much conrol over the stitching regions and can set control points for small-scale deformations in order to avoid ghosting (objects appearing twice, for example as a result of handheld shots or moving vegetation). And I always strive for a perfect panorama with no artefacts, even if it takes more time.

 

Matthias.

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Hi Matthias,

I pretty much always process pano RAWs in DxO Optics Pro to 16bit tiffs and stitch those not sure why you are restricting yourself to 8bit jpgs.

 

PTgui also has many additional features over AP when stitching what's surprised me is how little I seem to need them now, maybe I've just been lucky so far but as part of previous beta testing I re-created panos previously done with PTGui more easily and with less work I was genuinely surprised at that. Anyway a lot is also down to subject matter, lens position etc. so YMMV!

 

​Regards

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  • 2 weeks later...

Similar problems have occurred for me in the past but in the new beta the accuracy of stitching is much better. At that time the advice was to ensure greater overlaps in frames. In general it seems better to use a uniform exposure (that is manual) across a panorama sequence to avoid creating complications for an already complex process. It doesn't however eliminate problems as my post this morning under panorama artefacts reveals. There remain problems with the gradated screening and its processing out of RAW format. Apart from this AP seems to make what was once a time consuming procedure (in PS) fast and simple.

Michael

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One of the things that can complicate stitching is varying light conditions (like as the sun rises or sets) in the different shots, not just because the overall exposures may differ but also because shadows, highlights, & colors can shift enough between shots that the overlapping areas in adjacent frames do not appear to the stitching algorithm to have much of the same content.

 

People usually do not find it difficult to see what are just changing shadows & such but it takes a very "smart" algorithm to do that.

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