upon more work with the panoramas, everything I have thrown at it has worked nicely, most of them with out any defects (aside from edges, which just get cropped off anyway).  :-)

I have noticed, however, that the HDR feature doesn't quite seem to work properly, that is when I read in .tif files or .hdr files.  JPG seem to work fine, and I have access to the full HDR features.  I'm not using the 1.2 beta, is this a know issue?

Daniel_Buck wrote:

I may have to re-think my 1Ds Mark II purchase for landscapes

Indeed, Autopano is an amazing piece of software. But combined with the 1Ds MKII it gets even better, believe me Two weeks ago I was in -15C degrees for four days, shooting around 700 stills (some for panos) without the battery even starting to blink. You can't beat that! Our 5D had to do five recharges on the single battery the 1Ds used...

(R)

I have used Autopano for 3 months now and am amazed at how easily it achieves stitching panoramas together. However, as an avid devotee of film, I own what one might consider a film to digital home studio, using a Nikon super coolscan 5000 to convert slides and negatives to digital format at 25 MPixel resolution. I did this to ensure I could create large prints for display in my home as most high-end consumer digital cameras cannot equal this resolution (depends on the film of course). This software has made me rethink my adherance to film cameras for high resolution. My wife travelled to Durango CO 3 weeks ago, where I deliberately shot many different scenes on film specifically for panorama printing. I shot 4 rolls of film using my wife's Leica CM zoom of mountain snow scened and one panorama of Ouray CO, known as the little Switzerland of America. All-in-All, I shot over 50 negatives for panorama printing for 6 different scenes. Scanning took a while, and stitching was very quick and very accurate. I have spotted some "ghosting" in one of the panoramas where the background was busy and of low contrast, but the ones of snow scenes were absolutely flawless on the first pass. After I printed the panorama of Molas Pass between Silverton and Durango at 17" x 78" on my Epson 4800 I could not see any evidence that the scene was not shot on a wide angle camera such as a Widelux or large format camera. The resolution of my panoramas is such that it is in the hundreds of megapixels and capable of being enlarged to levels I would never consider using a 35 mm film camera to achieve.
This has led me to now, for the first time consider purchasing a digital camera to reduce the time-to-print from the camera to the printer. With the proper initial settings on the camera, the proper pan head (or as I have found...proper intention of the hand-held photo shoot), it appears as though even a 3 megapixel camera with a good lens can achieve a large format print using this software!
I have one note: When I render the photos, I render to photoshop format. The software during the file naming phase will not show me the 8 or 16 bit and layers menu if I have used it before. I must toggle to jpeg and back to photoshop format, select the proper save technique, then render. In my case, each photo is too many pixels to use layers to render at full resolution and I get the memory error. Till I found that the menus for the *.psd and *.psb can be restored by toggling out and back in the format selection drop-down, I couldn't figure out what was going on. 'Twould be nice to not have to toggle in and out to make a new selection.

I have been doing more and more landscapes with the 1Ds2, and I'm finally getting back to some of the Panoramas I took, I love AutoPano, each time I use it I like it more and more.  Can't say enough good about it :-)  I haven't tried 360x360 panos yet, thats next on my list, my boss has asked me to learn that, I know how to do it with RealViz Stitcher and a pano head setup, I'll do some tests soon with AutoPano and see how much/little ghosting is visible.

http://www.404photography.net/index.php?page=color_misc

I don't have any panoramas up there yet, but thats some of the landscapes from the past month or so.

Last edited by Daniel_Buck (2006-06-10 05:13:18)