Saturday 30 April 2016

How do I stitch a panorama to keep horizon without bumps while ignoring problems on nearby trees?


It's the lookout tower below. You can't shoot from a single place - you take pictures from four different positions, distant a few meters one from another.


I know there logically must be problems on nearby trees (distant only tens to hundreds of meters) but I'd accept enblend retouching/blurring here.


What do I need to prevent are bumps on the horizon. There shouldn't be any as it is tens of kilometers away!


Note 1: I hoped I could add control points manually (without help of Hugin's CPFind) - on the horizon only - but the results have still been poor.


Note 2: Taken without a tripod. I assume it's not a problem though as I've taken tens of other panoramas handheld and they've been stitched perfectly in Hugin.



Lookout Tower enter image description here



Answer



It's hard to tell, but it looks like in the stitched image your camera might have been aimed slightly above the horizon in at least 2 of the unstitched shots. By aiming up a little bit, the horizon at the widest part of your image "curls upwards" somewhat. This effect is similar to barrel distortion, and is more prominent with wider fields of view (shorter focal length lenses).


The solution is two-fold:




  1. Make sure your camera is absolutely level to the horizon. Use a bubble/spirit level on your tripod to determine this. In this case, it's the up/down tilt axis that is the most critical, that you're trying to resolve.




  2. Stitch together more shots, rather than fewer. The problem you want to avoid is distortion at the edges of the field of view. So increase the overlap for each successive shot (i.e., don't rotate as much between each shot, taking more shots). One way to do this is to rotate your camera to portrait orientation, and take your shots. You will be using the short axis of your sensor frame, thus requiring more shots to cover the same final stitched field of view as you would if used your camera in landscape orientation.





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