new user - first question - 8mm fisheye, HDR, stitching

[Joel Call]

Hello...

My name is Joel and I'd addicted to photography.

I have a few Nikons - D200, D100, Coolpix 5000 - and with my 5000 I have a Kaidan pan head and will take cylindrical and spherical pans with a 8mm fisheye lens (in FE2 and FE1 mode, in 5000-speak).

I use a program called "PhotoVista" for dedicated stitching - it has an 8mm 'lens file' that allows the software to properly stitch a distorted 8mm fisheye lens image. It works really well - nice and fast.

I'd like to start making some HDR cylinders and sphericals for some of my 3DS Max work, but my software cannot handle HDR images.

I also use PhotoMatrix Pro to make single-frame HDR images with exposure bracketing with my D200 and it works beautifully.

My problem:
I do not know how to 'combine' the power of these different programs to make a HDR out of a series of 9 shots for a cylinder and 3 shots for a spherical, with exposure bracketing.

I downloaded PS CS3 demo/trail and it has some good auto align tools, but that only seems to work with equirectangular photos - i.e. photos taken near the 50mm focal length region. I drop my 8mm photos in PS CS3 and it tries but cannot bend the images properly.

I had hoped to:
1) load the exposure bracketing range for a single pan-head click into PhotoMatrix Pro
2) make an HDR
3) repeat for each pan head click until I have a HDR for each pan click position
4) take the 9 HDRs into PS CS3 and stitch them, since PS CS3 can work with HDRs
5) end up with a pretty cylindrical or spherical pan that is a HDR image

There doesn't seem to be any place to tell PS CS3 to take into account the focal length of your lens when stitching.

Can someone point me in the right direction please?

Thanking you...

[Ron Marshall]

You might have better luck asking this question on Photo.net, since this is a large format site.

[Eric Rose]

actually www.photocamel.com is really good when it comes to hdr stuff. give them a try. and when you want to do some real photography (he he) come on back.

[BarryS]

No large format cameras and you call that an addiction? More like a hankerin'. Suggest you try Panoguide at http://www.panoguide.com/

[Joel Call]

heheh you guys are funny.

Thanks for the links and I'll give them a go.

-Joel

[Richard Wall]

Joel,
This is a large format forum, but I do a lot of 3D modeling work and can offer some help. Photoshop CS3 has a stitcher built into the program through the 'File->Automate->Photomerge' menu option. I have found that photomerge works well with some image sequences, but fisheye lenses are not generally supported. I have started using PTGui www.ptgui.com for stitching panoramas. The good news is that they support stitching HDR panos in their 'Pro' version. Photomatrix Pro, while a good program for creating HDR and tone mapping, does not stitch panoramas. However, you can create HDR's from your images before stitching. Once you have the HDR images tone mapped and have exported a JPEG (or PNG or Tiff), you can stitch those images then take the stitched pano into whatever 3D program you use as an environment map (I assume that is why you want the pano). I am doing something similar to this but with ElectricImage http://www.eitechnologygroup.com/, but that's another story.

Good luck.

r.