What's great about stitching with CS3 ?

[Jack Flesher]

I am aware of the flat-stitch technique, but I wouldn't call a stitch that merely doubles the MP count "high res". For that, one should be able to get LF-like quality !

To be even more accurate, the horizontal flat shift-stitch doesn't even double MP count, rather increases it by about 60%. To get to true LF quality you need to assemble about 50 MP of net image data, after allowing for the overlap.

[QT Luong]

By the way, Jack, I tried Photomerge in perspective and cylindrical, and it did a very good job with the uncorrected images.

The author of Autopano writes that by using the information present in the inter-relationships of multiple images, one can do a much better job at correcting the distortion than by using camera models such as DxO does.

[Jack Flesher]

QT, I suspect CS3-merge is doing something similar, because it is very good. The real issue for me is the convenience coupled with the quality of the final product -- I don't have to leave CS to do the stitch, it's fast, at least on my machine, and keeps the layers present for editing... Definitely fits easily into my workflow.

BTW, I don't think I mentioned this, but you can send files to CS3-Photomerge directly from Bridge.

Cheers,

[MarkWelsh]

First post here: but a number of familiar names here already . . .
I see this thread petered out a few months ago, but I've just come across a workaround for using DxO with lenses they haven't officially profiled: http://www.16-9.net/dxo.html

Tactical use of zooms for stitching seems not to have been discussed much also: most zooms progress from barrel to pincushion throughout their range, but most also have a sweet spot at which they are perfectly corrected for geometry: usually much better than the best prime at that focal length. For the Nikon 17-35mm it was 21mm; for the Canon 17-40mm it is 22mm; for the Canon 16-35mm II it is about 19mm. Given the rap the lens takes for distortion, actually at about 28mm, the 24-105L is ruler straight: better in this respect than the Zeiss 28mm. As a pano/stitching candidate it's almost perfect, and supported out of the box by DxO.

[Howard Slavitt]

Mark: are you doing cylindrical or perspective stitches? In my brief experimentation with AutoPano pro I didn't see an option for it to do the same thing as a "perspective" stitch in Photoshop CS 3. They are great for 35mm shift lenses or 45mm tse lenses. For stitching in Photoshp CS 3 with wider than a 35mm, or where there are parallax issues, the cylndrical stitch works extremely well, but it can create bizarre fisheye-type effects.