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Autodesk Stitcher 2009 - part 3 of 1 2 3 4

by Andrew Williams Published 01/04/2009

Full circle fisheye lenses such as this and the Sigma 4.5mm f/2.8 which I use are great for 360° panoramas, especially when working in confined spaces or when things are moving and you want to shoot fast. You only need three shots to produce a full 360° coverage (in theory you can use two but I like to have some overlap).

2. Stacking images for High Dynamic Range (HDR) panoramas Stitcher 2009 can load bracketed LDR (Low Dynamic Range) images in order to stack them to create HDR images or tone-mapped images. Stitcher 5.7 (and 2009) can use HDR images created by programs such as Photoshop or Photomatix Pro, as source images for a panorama.

Now you can also use 'normal' bracketed exposures, open them in Stitcher 2009 and automatically stack them. Stitcher will create an HDR image from the stack. This works well when you have high contrast scenes. I took this panorama in a short spell of sunny weather to test out this feature.

The sun was very low in the sky, just out of sight on the right of the image. I took three bracketed shot in each position. When you have loaded all the images into Stitcher select 'Stack Exposure By' from the HDR menu and enter the number of copies of each shot, in my case 3, and Stitcher will stack them into a pile for each different shot. [See above top and right]

Next use HDR > Camera Response > Compute Camera Response Curve to set the optimum use of the exposures to create the HDR panorama. Stitcher uses the EXIF data from your camera for this calculation. There is the facility to add this manually if necessary. You can see from the resulting panorama (above) that the left side of the image uses the darkest exposure whilst the right-hand side retains the shadow detail by using the lightest.

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1st Published 01/04/2009
last update 21/07/2022 08:46:26

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