Ghosting problems with panoramic stitching

amdgilmore

This might be a stupid question, but I'm not a big Photoshop user (I generally only make basic edits to my photos, so Lightroom is enough for me) and I'm semi-stumped here.

Basically I've been attempting to stitch some panoramas and everything seems to be working fine except that any shot with clouds in it exhibits noticeable ghosting due to the overlapping layers. At least I think it's ghosting...

Is there a quick way to fix this without having to go through the individual photos/layers and crop out the overlaps?

If it was just a couple of layers I wouldn't mind, but for some of the shots I want to do there might be 20-30 layers that could potentially have this issue.

Example (note the yellowish artefacts on the sky):

http://pix.ie/amdgilmore/2970865

pearljamfan

i cant see any yellow in the sky! are you using photoshop elements or cs5?

are there any other programmes you could try instead? i dont know if picasa has that feature, might be easier??

amdgilmore

pearljamfan wrote: »

i cant see any yellow in the sky!

There's a good chance your screen isn't calibrated correctly - especially if you're on a laptop (their displays tend to be slightly off, colour-wise).
The yellow tint is invisible on my laptop but quite noticeable on the desktop display, which was only recently calibrated.

Even if you can't see the yellow, you should be able to see the uneven, pixellated pattern on the sky (although you might need to angle your screen a little to see it).

Regarding programs... I'm using CS6. I don't know about any other programs for this purpose. Open to suggestions.

pearljamfan

yeh i see the pixels in the sky, i presumed it was a 200% crop or something, in that case i dont think youd notice it if it was printed a normal size,

have u tried saving it as it is and importing into lightroom and using the noise reduction slider on it, i wonder if that would help a bit?

and i think in photoshop theres a trick to get rid of banding in the sky using the unsharp mask, i cant remember exactly, but i googled

vic20

I don't see any yellow either so my laptop screen is out of kilter but I see the pixelation.

There's Hugin http://lifehacker.com/378490/stitch-photos-into-panoramas-with-free-software
Never used it so can't comment on it.

Picasa is no good for this but I found https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ICE/ which looks interesting (if the video is to be believed.)
Example here: https://picasaweb.google.com/118382419836661155966/HuntingtonBeach#5597176156298986002

amdgilmore wrote: »

There's a good chance your screen isn't calibrated correctly - especially if you're on a laptop (their displays tend to be slightly off, colour-wise).
The yellow tint is invisible on my laptop but quite noticeable on the desktop display, which was only recently calibrated.

Even if you can't see the yellow, you should be able to see the uneven, pixellated pattern on the sky (although you might need to angle your screen a little to see it).

Regarding programs... I'm using CS6. I don't know about any other programs for this purpose. Open to suggestions.

amdgilmore

pearljamfan wrote: »

yeh i see the pixels in the sky, i presumed it was a 200% crop or something, in that case i dont think youd notice it if it was printed a normal size,

have u tried saving it as it is and importing into lightroom and using the noise reduction slider on it, i wonder if that would help a bit?

No, the pixellation isn't visible at any zoom depth on the original photo, only on the blended ones. NR won't have any effect.

I can always paste in the sky from the individual photos, but I'd like to have a working process for this, rather than a bunch of workarounds.

@Vic - cheers, checking out those programs now.

vic20

My first trial of MS's ICE program looks OK on my less than perfect screen. Anyone care to inspect on a better monitor?

Baltimore harbour.



+



=

amdgilmore

Looks fine to me. I recompiled my panorama in ICE yesterday and it came back without the strange colouration (although some ghosting was still visible).

It's much faster than photoshop too.

I did another test yesterday evening to see how it dealt with more overlaps and more extreme perspective changes (ie shot a room from my feet to the ceiling) and unfortunately it came back with a fair few stitching errors, while CS6 got the stitching right. :mad:

Can't win.

For the moment I think I'm going to stick with CS6 - just because it gives you more flexibility for fixing these things.

I've also just discovered the Wide Angle Adaptive filter which means I can fix perspective errors fairly well in post and I actually don't need quite as much overlap between shots as a result (hopefully less ghosting on clouds/trees etc as a result).