Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook

8.4. Stage 4

8.4.1. Closing the sphere

I then continued with the two rows of photos taken at plus and minus 45°.

The manipulations were the same as those for the first row of photos. When I wasn't sure of a picture's correct position, I expanded the display to full screen, using the Windows→Full Screen command (keyboard shortcut: Spacebar).

In this particular panorama, one of the main problems was the presence of water! The surface of Venice's canals is seldom rough, but the reflections of the buildings—and the gondolas themselves, of course—have an annoying habit of moving in unpredictable ways. This forced Stitcher to do a lot of adjusting from one picture to the next.

One way to get a sneak peak at a stitched sectionis to launch a partial planar render with Render → Proof Preview.

For this panorama, the reflections didn't pose real difficulties during the stitching stage, though they created other problems later, as you will see. What gave me trouble was the gondola in the foreground—it moved a few inches between successive pictures. I finally wound up positioning the photograph as closely as I could by using reliable, fixed reference points (the dock and the railing) andthen forcing a stitch, using the Stitch→Force Stitch Image command (keyboard shortcut: Ctrl-Enter).

With Stitcher 4 it's very easy to see which images have been force-stitched——their thumbnails in the Image Strip have little orange markers instead of green ones.

I now had to position the final two photographs, ...