PTGui Pano Stitching Tutorial with Pro Tips Including Stitching "Wild" Nadir Images
This video goes throuigh all of the steps necessary to stitch together a set of separate fisheye images to create an equirectangular 360 deg by 180 deg panorama. I cover loading the intiital images, how to mask including some pro tips to mask faster, optimizing, and fixing boundary problems by spot masking. I also show how fit nadir images that are shot handheld or otherwise with the camera not locked to the same nodal position as the other shots.
It took me a long time to realize this, but I find that adding more control points beyond the ones PTGui has already generated doesn't help to improve the final fit. Instead I focus my time on finessing the masks to modify the borders between images. The only time where more control points are useful are when I have nadir images that were taken with the camera not locked in the same position as all of the other images. In this case, we want PTGui to focus on just the features close to the nadir, and not anything further away. So I mask the parts of the images away from the nadir, and generate control points again between the nadir images and the other images. After optimizing, I often can correct for many of the problems with the "wild" nadir shots.
Finally, it is possible to spend hours tweaking the masks between pairs of images to get perfect alignments so that straight lines line up and don't have breaks. But I've discovered that for many of these cases, it's easier just to fix these problems in Photoshop. So my preferred pipeline now is to get PTGui to get the image alignments 95%-99% of the way there. But instead of spending another hour or two to nail that final 1%-5%, I do the final repairs in Photoshop which is much quicker (not covered in this video).
PTGui 12.27
Equipment:
Fanotec Nodal Ninja
Canon EPS R5
Canon EF 8-15mm f/4.0L USM Fisheye Zoom Lens
Canon Control Ring Mount Adapter EF-EOS R