Equipment used.

All the panorama and mosaic pictures on these pages started out being taken on a Nikon Coolpix 5700. This is a very nice 5 Mega pixel digital camera. Though one must treat it with kid gloves to avoid the dreaded Lens Error (not at all like the rugged old Nikon F1), it produces some excellent results.

For some images I also used a home made panorama head, made to a design that was specifically for the Coolpix 5700 at its widest angle setting (35mm in 35mm equivalent units). However that is not to say that hand-held panoramas are out of the question. While post processing is simpler with images taken using a tripod, it is quite possible to get good results from hand-held shots.

Image Manipulation

The reason for such latitude (in using tripods or not) is because of the wealth of high quality freeware software that is available on the web. I raise my hat to the various authors of the suite of s/w briefly described below.

At the heart the whole process of turning these groups of shots into smoothly blended panoramas is Panorama Tools, which is a group of command line tools (panotoolsml.zip) which utilize a powerful image manipulation DLL (pano12.dll) originally programmed by Helmut Dersch. With this DLL installed on my system I could then use a group of other programs that are front ends to panorama tools.

First there is the excellent PTLens, which is available as a standalone program or a Photoshop plugin. It recognizes a small number of current digital cameras and lens combinations, fortunately including the Coolpix 5700. Feed your images to PTLens and it will read the EXIF info in the JPG files and automatically apply the correct adjustment to remove any barrel or pincushion distortion. Also see http://www.kekus.com/index.html for Mac users.

Next we open Hugin, a great freeware front end to panorama tools. This tool allows you to select common points (called control points) in a group of images. These are then used to stitch adjacent images together. It's a painstaking process, but why bother when there is AutoPano, which will do the hard work for you at one click - it integrates itself with Hugin. Just click a button and it will examine the image files and find the control points for you with uncanny accuracy.

Then there are just three more steps. Optimize the control points selected by AutoPano, using PTOptimize and then stitch them together using PTStitch to output separate TIF files. As their name implies, these two utilities are part of the Panorama Tools suite. Hugin simply uses them for you, so you don't need to learn their 'arcane syntax' (as DOS programs are often accused of having). 

The last step of all is to feed the output from Hugin/PTStitch to the Enblend tool which makes a truly fine job of seamlessly joining up the parts into the whole. It is another DOS command, and there's no front end for it, so you need to get into the DOS box to work. Perhaps I should write a front end for it myself.

Granted there are quite a few steps there to carry out but hey, learning new stuff is fun!!