Tag Archives: stitching

Pano Experiment with a Fisheye

I will freely admit this is not my idea. It is something that I read about recently on an astrophotography post that caught my attention. I was about to make a visit to a museum where I thought I might end up taking some interior images in confined space. My 16-35mm lens was probably going to do the trick but I wondered whether the fisheye might be a better bet if things were really tight. My only concern with that is the distortion is such a feature of that lens that it might not be worthwhile.

Then I came across the aforementioned article and it talked about shooting panos with a fisheye. The article was concerned with wide sky shots for astrophotography, but I thought it might work for me too. Supposedly, stitching together multiple fisheye shots takes out a lot of the distortion while still giving you the wide reach. I decided to experiment with this in advance to see if it worked.

I played with this indoors but taking a sequence of shots with good overlap between them making sure to catch as wide an image as possible. I was using the fisheye with full frame coverage rather than the circular version of the image. In Lightroom, I had to turn off the profile correction since that plays with the shots a lot and then set the pano function to work. It combined the images very easily and, sure enough, the verticals across the shot were not all vertical and not distorted at all. This could be something I now use a lot in the future when working in confined spaces. I will need to test it for closer subjects first since I suspect that will be a lot more testing for the alignment issues in pano stitching.

Various Ways To Stitch A Panorama

Lightroom has three methods for stitching the panoramas together.  I tend to use one but for some shots, a different style is beneficial.  I was flipping through some shots of an HH-101 Caesar helicopter that I took at RIAT in 2019.  I also had a Danish AW101 that I had shot in pano format.  The Danish airframe had not been shot as well as it could have been and I did not have sufficient coverage.  I decided to try different versions of the stitching to see which one gave the best result.  Some result in a more natural look while others look more fish eyed.  I can also stitch in Photoshop which gives me more capability for filling in gaps but, with the tricky areas being the rotors, that wasn’t going to work well since the AI is not going to work that out.  Stitching also allows some warping to fill edge gaps but this can mess with the alignment of the main part of the image.  I tried a couple of versions and they are compared here.