Remember awhile back we were talking about stitching panoramas and
which applications were best, and Calico got the vote from some of us
including me?

Well, I found out something this week. Two things. One is that
Photoshop CS3 (and probably CS4, but I don't have that) does a very
good job of it. I haven't tested it but it has a cylindrical setting
which I think must do a complete 360 if that's what you want. But it
does excellent long multi-rowed stitching. Top quality.

File ---> Automate ----> Photomerge.

The second thing is that I have been trying to sneak up on the
foreground and background and refocus for each so I don't end up with
a fuzzy distance or foreground. I thought I could do that with
Calico and erase the out of focus areas in Photoshop layers, because
it will save the panorama as a layered photoshop file. But it just
saves them as a layered photoshop file. You can't actually DO
anything with it but look so you might as well go ahead and flatten
it or not save it that way at all. You can turn off the individual
layers and their absence is not even noticed by the application, and
you can't edit the individual layers at all. Maybe somebody smarter
than I knows how, but I sure couldn't find it.

But if you stitch it in Photoshop CS3's Photomerge filter, it will
not just save you a layered photoshop file ... it saves the best
parts of each layer. You click off a layer, and you can sometimes
discover that it saved various areas of that layer and the rest is
just clear ... but another layer took over that area automatically.

That happened with my 15 frame (3 rows of 5) panorama today. And the
ones it used are the sharp ones. It left the out of focus areas
clear on both the foreground and background ... and the ones in the
background that contained out of focus foreground contained really
out of focus foreground material, and vice versa. I was thrilled.

I don't have a pano head for my tripod, so I shoot hand held, but
even so it worked perfectly. I want to get me a Panosaurus, or maybe
a fancier pano head when feel justified in spending the kind of money
they cost for something that will primarily be a toy for me ... you
can't shoot a panorama through a hole or other nearby objects because
the parallax is impossible at close range. But otherwise, hand held
is no problem using Photoshop to stitch with, and it does it with a
click and a whistle.

This is somewhere around 200 degrees of the circle, probably a bit more:

<http://www.theperfectstick.com/billy/>


Doug

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