scotview wrote:
Great photos
Do you do your panoramas in camera or do you photo stitch ?
If in camera, what camera do you use.
Thanks - if I'm doing anything more than a straight 'up-and-down' hike, I tend to leave my good camera at home and just use my cheap Nokia 3.4 mobile for my photos, which also gets used for GPS and map duties whilst I'm out and about as well, and with yesterday's hike being about 7-hours, and with a heavy-enough pack as things were, I'm glad I made that decision...
The Nokia has got a 'panorama' photo mode, but I've never really been happy with the results, and so I tend to take a very rough series of '
click-and-spin' photos of any proposed panoramic view on the Nokia, which really takes very little effort over and above trying to keep at least
some semblance of 'level-ness' as I rotate a few times about my footing.
I can honestly say that for such a rough and ready mountain-top process, the end-results are almost always really impressive.
When I'm back home I just throw them at the free Image Composite Editor (ICE) for Windows, and just let it do it's stuff, with the only manual intervention from me being to crop-down the auto-stitched image to remove any 'stagger' that's been introduced when I've not managed to keep completely 'flat' between clicks, and then I also nudge up the resulting JPG quality to maximum before saving the panoramic JPG file, so the whole process is really quick and simple.
Having just taken a quick look, I can see that I first mentioned the ICE software on this thread linked below from 2019, when as luck would have it, I posted a picture of the very same area as I hiked yesterday, but with the 2019 winter photo looking towards the Mickleden Valley in the centre and The Band just to the left of it -
https://www.lemonfool.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=4836&start=400#p200332If anyone's interested in the panoramic ICE software, here's a few snapshots showing the simple process to render the Scafell panorama that I posted yesterday -
First thing is to load the individual split pictures into the ICE software -
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/OHN46Sg.png)
Clicking 'Next' from the above section will then show the ICE software rendering the individual images and stitching them together automatically -
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/w8of5Pe.png)
When the above process has completed, with this one taking about 40 seconds, we're presented with a 'Stitch' screen, where a number of different post-alignment processes can be used to gain different 'panoramic' effects, and I'm usually happy to just leave things on the default 'Cylindrical' option -
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/pfUWjAb.png)
After that, we're presented with a 'Crop' section, where we can manually tweak the boxed crop area shown below, taking into account any slight misalignment issues that might now be apparent from the original 'click and spin' multi-picture process never quite being as 'level' as we might like it to have been. This is just a case of dragging the box size and four edges shown below around the composite image, to ensure that the resulting panoramic photo removes all the misalignment 'gaps', and looks 'flat' on all four sides -
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/f6B1TOs.png)
Once the appropriate panoramic 'rectangle' has been defined above, it's then just a case of moving to the 'Export' section and upping the JPG quality to 'Superb' or manually entering a '100' quality level, and then hitting the 'Export to disk' option -
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/PQggNKq.png)
The final results of the above process, taking just a few minutes -
Source for all the above images - my own ICE software session.The Windows ICE software shown above used to be available for free via one of the Microsoft pages, but I see that they've now removed it and have it marked as 'Archived', with no indication of where they've actually archived it to, but luckily someone used the WayBack machine to capture both the 32-bit and 64-bit installer download links before that happened, so here they are if anyone wants to give the above process a go on their own Windows machines -
Image Composite Editor (ICE) v2.0.3 (for 32 bit) - https://web.archive.org/web/20190309221948/https://download.microsoft.com/download/A/7/8/A7804C73-ECDB-4459-BB3E-A7F13C4C5382/ICE-2.0.3-for-32-bit-Windows.msiImage Composite Editor (ICE) v2.0.3 (for 64 bit) - https://web.archive.org/web/20190223050207/https://download.microsoft.com/download/7/3/9/73918E0B-C146-40FA-B18C-EADF03FEC4BA/ICE-2.0.3-for-64-bit-Windows.msiCheers,
Itsallaguess