ALIGN TWO 360 PANORAMAS

[Bussty]

Hello all

I have taken a 360 panorama using a drone quite high above the ground so parallax is minimal. With the drone in the same spot I ran two 22 image sequences, the first exposing for the shadows the second exposing for the highlights.

My goal is to align the two panoramas then blend manually in Affinity Photo/Photoshop.

What I'm really hoping PTGUI can do is perfectly align the two panoramas. I can't do this as an HDR or Exposure Fusion Pano  (well I don't think I can) as the drone seems to have used slightly different positions for the two sequences but overall the panoramas are the same. So if I can't stagger the individual images in PTGUI and call them brackets as they don't necessarily line up shot for shot.

I have mucked around in Affinity Photo using Mesh warp and gotten a pretty good results but I'm just thinking there must be a more straightforward way?  

Any assistance greatly received. In hindsight I should have done a two shot bracket shot for shot and just run the images through PTGUI as an HDR sequence. 

Many thanks in advance!

Cheers 

Andrew Busst

[PTGui Support]

Hi,

If the image sequences are taken in approximately the same directions,
then it's best to rearrange them in dark/bright/dark/bright.. order.
Then do Images -> Link HDR bracketed exposures and tell PTGui not to
link the posititions.

If not, I would throw all images into PTGui and let it align all of them
together. Then run Create Panorama twice, enabling only half of the
source images. The resulting panoramas can be fused by loading them into
a new PTGui project.

In the first case you can enable 'Find Optimum Seams'. In the latter
case it must be disabled, because you will have different seam locations
in both panoramas.

But I don't think the result will be perfect with either method. Even
small drone movements may cause a certain amount of parallax. Even
differences of a few pixels will be noticeable when doing HDR.

Kind regards,

Joost Nieuwenhuijse
www.ptgui.com

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[Bussty]

Hi Joost 

I kind of stumbled on quite an effective method. 

I stitched the dark sequence to a tiff 360 pano carefully lining up a feature in the pano on a specific guideline, then I stitched the light sequence to a separate tiff lining up the same feature to the same guideline in PTGUI. This gave me two roughly aligned Pano's

Then I loaded them both into PTGUI and aligned them, then carefully used masks to take out the sky in one and insist on the land in the other and it worked out really well.

The way PTGUI blended the exposures was great in fact I might use that method for doing HDR's of normal scenes!

Your above method though to line them up does make sense though and would make it simpler. Where do I select or deselect the "Find Optimum Seams" option? 

Many thanks 

Andrew Busst 

[Bussty]

All good found it! Panorama Editor / Blending Section to right....

Thanks