thedude.com

I’m very impressed with the results produced by the latest version of PhotoVista. I forgot to level the camera for this panorama, and the results are still nearly perfect.

There are still a few steps involved to get this kind of quality.

1. Shoot 8 RAW images using a Nikkor 14mm lens with the camera in portrait orientation on a Kaidan Panoramic head.
2. Open the 8 RAW images in PhotoShop, apply color-correction, dust spot when necessary.
3. Apply the amazing PTLens filter to each image to correct for minor distortion introduced by the wide-angle lens.
4. Save the images as high-quality JPEG’s. (I could choose non-lossy compression at this point, but I know the image will be greatly reduced in size for the web, so a little compression is OK here.)
5. Open the eight corrected images in PhotoVista and create a 360 degree panorama. (This is now the easiest part!)
6. Save the resulting panorama as a high-quality JPEG.
7. Open the panorama in PhotoShop and apply color-correction, spotting, sharpening, etc. as needed.
8. Reduce the size of the 18,000 pixel-wide panorama to something that will work on the web. This is done in steps - reducing the size 90% or so several times, sometimes applying a little sharpening along the way until reaching the desired size - in this case 5,000 pixels wide.
9. Create a custom VR page using the .ivr file created by PhotoVista.
10. Maybe even make a highly compressed version of the original file at its native size for those who have bandwidth to spare.
11. Make an entry on the blog!

thedude proves it’s possible.

I should mention that I used the latest version of PhotoVista to stitch this together. The original 17,860 pixel-wide version is the best “automatic” stitch I’ve ever produced - at least in terms of stitch accuracy. The new version’s automatic lens detection is a real time-saver. This means that for most panoramas, it’s probably not worth the effort of using the more flexible and possibly more accurate PanoTools.

If you’d like to see this scene in it’s proper perspective, click here. Be patient. It could take a second or two to download.

Australian Peter Murphy regularly posts awesome 360 degree QTVR’s on his Panoramic VR Weblog. I find these panoramas to be so immersive! The next best thing to being there. Mr. Murphy has given a lot of thought to 3D panorama techniques, and you can see this in his wonderful results.

Of course, if you like this sort of thing as much as I do, you really should check out Panoramas.dk - in my opinion the ultimate full-screen QTVR site. Gorgeous panoramas like this one, will make you glad you bought that giant LCD display. :)

It just continues to amaze me. I recommend you check out all of the full-screen VR’s!

Thanks, Carl for pointing me to this incredible shot of New Year’s Eve in Times Square.

Kelly and I drove to Fresno over the weekend to attend the marriage of our friends Scott and Cindy. I was not the official photographer, so I did not have the sort of equipment I would have needed to take good shots of the bride and groom. I wanted to give them something unique, so I shot this virtual tour of the procedings and a few snapshots of the family. Here are some of my favorites.

Having trouble viewing the panorama? If you’re running Windows and Internet Explorer and you see nothing but a gray box when you click on the image above, go to this page and install Java.

By the way, you’ll find the rest of the pictures I shot on this beautiful day here.

I took about 10 of these panoramas so that I’d be sure to get one that would stitch together nicely. I was absolutely determined to share the view from Lelah’s balcony with all of you. Click on the image below to view a 180+ degree panorama of the view. The file is quite large, (400K) and will take a moment to download. Please be patient, and let me know if this does not work in your browser.

Having trouble viewing the panorama? If you’re running Windows and Internet Explorer and you see nothing but a gray box when you click on the image above, go to this page and install the Java plug-in.

Thanks to Carl Parkes for introducing me to this stunning web site. The site features breathtaking full-screen Quicktime VR images. The technical quaility of the images is the best I have seen, and the locations are amazing. The image that originally caught Carl’s eye is a full 360 degree view taken from the inside of a shipwreck in Bali!

Thedude says check it out!

If you have never clicked on my Virtual Tours link - do it now.

If you’re interested, I used four different cameras in the making of these, but just one piece of software - PhotoVista - dataing back to the days when it was part of John Scully’s Live Picture. (Later it was owned by MGI, then ROXIO, now I See Media… (?)

Many thanks to my most excellent neighbor Andrew for inspiring me to find a way to display these on any platform. Andrew is another reason I love the lofts. At some point I will have a lot to say about this man of many, many talents. For now, check out his evolving web site.