Panasonic Fx520 compact vs Niikon D40 DSLR

Compressed to 1920 using Gimp at 30% compression setting from 14894.

The picture at sabahheaven.blogspot.com has an original resolution of 16712 from its 10Mpixel pictures.

This picture has more healing because it has more gaps. Its equivalent lens is at 18mmx1.5 which is 27mm, compared to Fx520 26mm(stated 25mm).

Using panotools in Hugin, hfov for Fx520 is 67.43 degree.
Hfov for D40 is 67.88 degree.

Based on the data above it shows that D40 lens is wider than Fx520. It must have been due to my technique. It is surprising in that I actually uses the viewfinder instead of the LCD screen. It shows that the viewfinder is not good because it does not capture the true state of the digital image and parallax error should be more because I have to tilt the camera while viewing the viewfinder.

Both cameras at are set to fully automatic.

Smartblend vs Enblend

Warisan Square blended using enblend as output from Hugin normal blend.

Even without extra control points in order to correct the parallex errors, the posts appear to be straighter than that used in sabahheaven.blogspot.com which is blended with smartblend.

Enblend is not too bad in my current machine(athlon 64 X2 5200 with 4Gbyte RAM) but smartblend is still much faster.

The enblend is the one coming with my Hugin 0.7 rc2 for Windows.

Panoramic pictures from 18 shots of Fx520

I was able to reduce the number of shots in order to form a 360x180 degree panorama to 18, by using the 26mm equivalent focal length of the Fx520. I don't need a tripod, philipod or manual exposure. It is better to use automatic exposure.

8 pictures held vertically at zero degree pitch, i.e. horizontally. 4 pictures help horizontally, tilted up and 4, tilted downwards. One picture pointed up and another pointed down.

8 and 4 around you is easy to determine. Any other number is much more difficult. With Fx520, The overlap is only about 12%(67degree/4*3*8/360) but I was able to stich the panoramic picture using panotools in Hugin. The are areas that are not covered but this is a small price to pay for the convenience. Taking more pictures does not guarantee complete coverage because I tend to make mistakes since I don't use a proper tool.

I was able to take form a panormic picture of my living room which is only about 20 feet long. There is parallax error, but it is manageable. It should be severe for such a small space but the resulting picture is acceptable to me. I tried to stich using enfuse and smartblend. Because there is little cropping, the ghosting effect is sever in enfuse generated panorama, but its exposure is more consistent. Smartblend is very fast and has no ghosting but with more prominent exposure inconsistencies, because I use flash and automatic exposure for all the shots.

Initially smartblend failed to stich but when I switched off the "cropping", the panorama stiched properly.

using smartblend

Smart blend is now my choice for blending software. It is much faster than enblend 3.1 and enfuse that comes with Hugin RC2 for windows. Less than 5 minutes instead of 30 minutes.

Better still, I no longer need to do any cropping in order to improve the resolution of the blended pictures. Enfuse tends to distort the pictures which are not overlapping perfectly, which is usually the case for me since I don't use a pano head.

Enfuse is better at exposure blending but smartblend is better than enblend and does not introduce distortion in overlapped regions. Smartblend probably has an autocrop function.

I just enblendGUI in order to make it easy for me to invoke smartblend but it means that I cannot use other options because smartblend is not compatible with enblend when it comes to specifying options. Have to be satisfied with the default which is good enough for me.

If you want to specify other options, you may need to edit cmd batch files. Enfuse has a good GUI which allows us to specify all options in a GUI environment.

Since I bought the Panasonic Fx520, I was able to compare fixed exposures versus programmed exposures which optimise exposures for each scene. Enfuse is able to merge exposures perfectly and allows us to have an HDR quality viewable panormaic pictures. smartblend is not as good but manageable.

Samples of both techniques are presented in my blog sabahheaven.blogspot.com

smartblend however failed to blend heavily overlapped pictures, such as the case with bracketed exposures. Since I don't use a tripod for my bracket exposures, there are bound to be slight misalignments between bracketed exposures. Enfuse will not be able to blend these pictures without any loss of resolution.

Hugin, though autopano or manual control point insertion, does not allow high precision stiching of pcitures to form a perfect panorama. It is even worse for me because I don't use a pano head. Using philipod, i.e. a piece of string to lock the position of my lens focus point, is not good enough.

In the end, I simply choose the best exposures and blend only one set of panoramic picture. I don't think hugin is well equipped for HDR panorama yet. 3 bracketed exposures also do not give sufficient dynamic range as shown by the HDR viewers.

ptviewer in Tikiwiki

http://othman.000webhost.info/tikiwiki-2.0/tiki-index.php?page=History

This is a Tikiwiki v2.0 site.

Unregistered users can still send articles but will have to be
approved by me. Registered users can upload pictures of unlimited
sizes.

Don't use the image galleries for large pictures.

You should be able to use the ptviewer module by using the code:

{MODULE(module=ptviewer,pano_file=img/wiki_up/filename.jpg)}{/MODULE}

The code above to be inserted in articles and wiki, is not tested.

I'm busy showing the panoramic pictures that had already been
uploaded. In addition, I also show 6Mpixel pictures that are part of
the panoramic pictures before they are stiched.

You are encouraged to insert your own adsense adverts for any
contribution. The module is called newadsense.

For more information, please refer to tikiwiki documentations.

I should be preparing better documentations for tikiwiki as I go
along.

--
Sabah is heaven. Beautiful shark-free beaches and mountains next to
civilisation with no natural and man-made disasters except Malaysia.
My homepage:
http://othman.000webhost.info/
http://othmana.tripod.com/

I've mastered Panoramic photography

You can view the results at sabahheaven.blogspot.com and panorama.000webhost.info

It took more than 5 years for me to do this. I don't even have a Panorama head. I had used 3 digital cameras. The chinese lenses are good enough but not comparable to the Carl Zeiss Tessar lens.

The original photos are still useful because they can be used in the future when Panorama stitching software will be more advanced. I started with Autostich which is fully automatic but I prefer Hugin which allowed me to manually adjust the alignments of each picture. Unfortunately there is no zoom for the previewer making it necessary for me to stitch first before readjusting the alignments of the images.

The sets of photos may not be complete, resulting in blank spots in the 360x180 degree panorama pictures. Initially I just left them as they are but there are tools to heal these spots making the pictures more palatable. It is not important for me to have a perfect picture. I just want to capture the beauty of Sabah for eternity. Despite huge differences in exposures, enfuse managed to balance them in the final blending of the pictures together.

There is no more problem of people that keep on moving in the pictures especially in crowded places. The solution is very simple. Just take multiple pictures for the same angle of view. You can crop the unwanted scenes. This cropping is the most tedious but will result in much better quality pictures. Enfuse/Enblend still cannot merge pictures perfectly while maintaining the clarity of the merged regions. Autostich managed to do it more convincingly but it took too long. Maybe it has an automatic cropping mechanism. This could be the future, but for the moment, the semi automatic method used in Hugin is the best for me so far.

The site where the panoramic pictures are to be viewed needs a special review. I just use free hosting services. When it is free, it can be kept forever even if I were gone.

My prefered site is the 000webhost . I initially subscribed it almost a year ago.

I still maintain my othmana.tripod.com free host but it only allows 20 Mb of data. When compared with other free hosts, tripod.com stands above all. That domain name is very important and rarely provided by free hosting services. Although it provides Perl CGI, it is too limited for most online work, but I was able to run a Perl scripted free shopping cart at that site.

The reason why I stopped working with 000webhost was that it was not reliable. After a year, it still survives and its downtime is much lower. I started looking and reviewing other free hosting services.

www.freehostsfinder.com is the best reviewer . It can even tell you the hosts availability. At 96.8% uptime it is at the 36th position but the best uptime in the list is only about 98.6%.

The best uptime is not listed, but 1stfreehosting.com used to achieve more than 99%. I tried it because of its 20Gbyte hard disk space.

Actually there are more aspects of Panorama photography that needs to be discovered.

Future of Digital Imaging, HDR.

View HDR fjpeg Pano using Ptviewer 3.1 which I use for my Pano Website viewer.

HDR is just a high contrast picture. You need to take 3 photos for each scene, using normal, over and under exposure settings. Since Hugin can handle HDR, and memory card gets cheaper, I shall start taking 3 sets of pano pictures from now on.

Working with the latest Free Panorama Stitcher: Hugin

You can download this version and read my comments at this thread:
http://groups.google.com.my/group/hugin-ptx/browse_thread/thread/6d939026ba0c56ad/56adde14fa394f64?hl=en&lnk=gst&q=hugin+3061#56adde14fa394f64

One additional technique that I used, is the Philipod, a piece of
string attached to weights, instead of a tripod.

It worked well, but it was very tiring. The errors for distant objects
such as this beach is virtually negligible that autopano-sift was able
to join all the pictures together except pictures of the sky and the
ground. The ground where I took the pictures from, I just take it by
extending my hand, without the Philipod. This area is very minimal
because the Philipod is just a piece of string so I can take pictures
as close to the string as possible.

The sky and ground, I try to take at yaw and roll of zero degree, and
pitch of +90 and -90, and enter these values into hugin for its
preview. Don't optimize these two points as they are not well
calibrated. They are useful as fillers only.

The result is the missing tripod from my panoramic pictures.

enfuse software allows the adjustment of exposures as shown by this
KYC pano picture. Just make sure that you have lots of hard disk space
for the swap/temporary files,i.e.more than 12 Gbytes.

Immersive 360 degree Panoramic Videos for Malaysia ?

http://demos.immersivemedia.com/index_directorfound.php?scene=03

This could be the state of the art in panoramic equipment. It is
capable of taking panoramic photos in realtime and convert it into
realtime panoramic video.

It is used by google to give panoramic pictures of famous streets but
in the meantime only in USA that I can find out at the moment.

For more info on my attempts at learning about this technology, you
may refer to my blog at
360x180pano.blogspot.com