by bpaci » Mon Mar 05, 2012 10:27 pm
First of all, in that particular picture a panoramic assembling was not necessary because my wide angle 10mm was enough to have the whole thing in a unique picture.
But I decided to use panoramic to raise the resolution of the picture to be able to print it in large format. With panoramic assembling the picture is 6200x3500 instead of only 4200x2800.
The HDR process with sns-hdr permit me to very easily obtain a good ajustment in light level. I suppose that in this particular case you could have obtain almost the same exposures by using curves but it takes a very long time and requires some skills. With sns-hdr I obtain a really good result immediatly.
Also, without HDR lights would have been over exposed in the windows of the building.
I've tried a lot of paths to make panoramic HDR images, and the only one that works well is to begin by process each set of bracketed pictures in the HDR software, taking care to use exactly the same parameters for all the picture sets. I used a custom preset to apply the same parameters for each set.
Each HDR obtained image is save in TIFF 16 bits.
Finally, I merge HDR tiff images in a panoramic software that must be able to process 16 bits images (CS5, or other).
When i take pictures for a panoramic image I always take pictures in portrait mode. After the merging the resulting image may be curved because of image distorsions and it's better to have enough space at the top and at the bottom to be able to cut.
For this picture I wanted the darkest parts of the building to be full of details so I exposed for these parts, at F/10 to have a full depth of field. I choosed the bracketing gap of +-1.3 to reduce the overexposure of lights.