I'm pretending to be a great photographer when taking panorama shots. Mostly it's because I don't own a good wide lens, so I'm trying to pretend to own one by taking panorama shots. Panorama shots are the reason I had to buy more DDR4 for my PC, so my computer could handle the huge panoramas I'm occasionally taking.
But now I'll show a bit how I'm stiching the panoramas together using Affinity Photo. I bought Affinity Photo because one day I realized I hate to use GIMP for anything and I wanted to get a real high quality software to be used. Photoshop was sadly out of question, as I'm trying to avoid monthly subscriptions. Affinity Photo was one of the photo editing software with great reviews, so I gave it a shot.
Now I don't even want to switch.
One of my favorite features is the panorama stiching tool. I'm showing here how it can handle a simple panorama of 14 photos. I took the photos of the most ugly church I've ever seen. I saw it when I was visiting some relatives during Christmas holidays, but the church is not the point in here.
The start was simple enough. I added all 14 photos to the "New panorama"-tool and then clicked "Stitch panorama". It automatically finds out the correct spots for each photo, as long as it's able to do that. If it can't find the stitch all the photos together, it can create 2 or more panoramas - or just leave out the extra photos it couldn't stitch anywhere.
After a while of thinking, the panorama is stiched together. I've taken the photos without a tripod, so there has been slight shaking, but usually I'm trying to have enough space to give a tolerance for mistakes. But now to the big picture, clicking OK takes us forward and the panorama will be rendered.
As you can see, there is some opaque in the photos. As Affinity Photo is still rendering, you can see dark spots in the sky. Luckily the program automatically removes most of mistakes like that.
But as the finished photo still has some empty space in it, it's time to crop the photo a bit.
Cropping can be done manually or automatically. "Crop to opaque" allows the program to recognize the opaque areas and crop the photo just enough that all the opaque will be left out.
The photo can also be straightened/rotated with this. Perfect when taking photos of the horizon, you can draw a simple line. The photo will be straightened based on the line, that the line would be either straight horizontal or straight vertical.
Now as the photo is cropped, we lost a small piece of the church in top left corner. It's fine though, as the church is ugly.
Now as we've proceeded to the normal editing phase, adjusting contrast, colors etc. we can zoom in and see the very fine details in the photo. I'm assuming you hadn't noticed it was snowing when I took the photos?
This ~100MP panorama would be almost 100 MB if saved with full quality. I'm assuming 20k * 5k pixels is a bit too much, as I don't want 100 megapixel photos of a building I don't even like.
So I decided to take the size down, that the longer side is ONLY 10k pixels. I'm not going to save this as PNG or TIFF, but as a high quality JPEG. I fucking love JPEGs.
I'm not sure what Steempeak does to files, but the finished panorama is below. You can hopefully open the image as a larger, more easily zoomed version from the link below. If Steempeak harms photo quality, don't worry. Nothing of value is lost.
But this is how simple my process of panorama stiching is. In best cases, it's just "Add photos", "Stich", "Ok" and "Crop to Opaque". Fun and easy. Even more fun with panoramas when I'm moving my camera left and right, but also up and down! Wooo! The issue is that in these cases the risk of vertical or horizontal lines being a bit.. glitchy. But that's also the reason I didn't show them to you this time.
