Re: excellent composited/stitched photos

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On Fri, Jul 26, 2002, Gerald Oskoboiny wrote:
> This site:
>
>     Max Lyons Digital Image Gallery
>     http://www.tawbaware.com/maxlyons/index.html
>
> has some amazing pictures that were made by taking a bunch of pics
> and stitching them together, similar to the panoramic stitching stuff
> included with most modern digital cameras but with an improved
> process and tools.

He says he was using panorama factory[1] (indeed shareware) but he switched
to panotools, which is available on many platforms. However, panotools
is everything but easy to use. An easy tool for whom wants to try
stitching would be Canon's photostitch (bundled with -almost?- every
consumer digital camera from Canon). Other tools here:
http://www.panoguide.com/software/

In my opinion, the most useful use of image blending is not panorama
stitching, but blending to improve the dynamic range[2]. Slides are
known to have a small dynamic range (Density ~3.2 IIRC), inferior to
that of negative film. What is little known is that the sensors in
digital cameras (especially consumer cameras) have an even lesser
dynamic range.

Because of that, the usual trick (basically, underexpose and
post-process, since you can recover underexposed areas but can't recover
blown-up ones) is sometimes not enough to portrait a high-contrast
scene, and this technique comes in handy, and is quite easy to perform
(provided you have a tripod and a camera with manual exposure setting).

Tutorial:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/blended_exposures.shtml
Another example:
http://www.fredmiranda.com/article_2/index.html

Note that these tutorials only show horizontal blending, but (since
software like the gimp are not too bad at oblique gradients, and,
generally speaking, and layer manipulation in general) nothing
stops you from doing more complicated stuff. Kind of a digital "zone
system"[3] in some sense :).

If you feel this is "cheating", you've never seen what they do in "real"
darkrooms. That reminds me of a book where the photographer explains
how to use cardboard and scissors to make miniatures, cover part of the
print with the miniature's (or, sometimes, his hands/fingers) shadow, and
thus blend multiple exposures on a single print...
I'm not good with scissors, I prefer The Gimp. ;)


[1] http://www.panoramafactory.com/download.html
[2] http://www.dpreview.com/learn/Glossary/Digital_Imaging/Dynamic_Range_01.htm
[3] Ask google.

--
Olivier
http://yoda.zoy.org

Re: excellent composited/stitched photos

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  • None.

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On Sun, 28 Jul 2002, Olivier Thereaux wrote:

> Tutorial:
> http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/blended_exposures.shtml

In this tutorial I wonder why he didn't clone the layer and used the level
select tool instead of manually working on the merging layer, I'll try
that.

> Another example:
> http://www.fredmiranda.com/article_2/index.html

An interesting thing there, he says that only one raw file is needed. It
looks like it's a compromize as having multiple images taken using
bracketing would give far more dynamic than working only on the same raw.
But I don't know how many camera have this feature.

> darkrooms. That reminds me of a book where the photographer explains
> how to use cardboard and scissors to make miniatures, cover part of the
> print with the miniature's (or, sometimes, his hands/fingers) shadow, and
> thus blend multiple exposures on a single print...

I did it two times with scissors, papers, little cords to have that
hanging in the air slightly to avoid too contrasted marks on the picture,
Quite fun to do, but at the beginning you throw away some papers, which is
not the case using digital pictures (you just eat time).

--
~~Yves

Re: excellent composited/stitched photos

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  • None.

Parents:

Olivier Thereaux <[email protected]> writes:

> Because of that, the usual trick (basically, underexpose and
> post-process, since you can recover underexposed areas but can't recover
> blown-up ones) is sometimes not enough to portrait a high-contrast
> scene, and this technique comes in handy, and is quite easy to perform
> (provided you have a tripod and a camera with manual exposure setting).

Called "burning and dodging."  Where you burn in image - for instance
lighter area with detail that wouldn't be visible otherwise while
dodging (blocking) the rest of the exposure.  I use to do this with
back and white.

--
Ted Guild <[email protected]>
http://www.guilds.net

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