How to make tiny planet center hole small

[Melissa Nelson]

Has anyone figured out how to make the tiny planet center hole small? No matter how far down I point my camera, I still get a huge hole to fill. Am I asking too much from the program? The 'fill hole' feature is not helpful when the hole is gigantic. 

[Erik Krause]

Am 22.04.22 um 12:53 schrieb Melissa Nelson:

> Has anyone figured out how to make the tiny planet center hole small?

Shoot the nadir. What camera and setup do you use? There are several
possibilities to do this...

--
Erik Krause

[Melissa Nelson]

Hi Erik,

I use a Sony a7iii with a 20mm lens on a ball head tripod. The lens distortion tends to require a lot of manual control point work if I shoot in landscape, so I always to shoot in portrait orientation.

Melissa

[John Houghton]

Melissa, Are you taking steps to rotate the camera about the entrance pupil of the lens (AKA "no-parallax point" or "nodal point"), or are you simply rotating around the mount socket on the bottom of the camera?  Ideally, you should use a panorama head of some sort that positions the camera so that the entrance pupil is located on the axis of rotation in order to avoid parallax issues.  Are you shooting one or multiple rows of images?  If the camera is correctly mounted, it should not matter if you shoot in landscape or portrait orientation.  The lens distortion is the same in either case and PTGui is able to correct it very well, so there should be no stitching difficulties.

John

[Erik Krause]

Am 22.04.2022 um 19:01 schrieb Melissa Nelson:

> I use a Sony a7iii with a 20mm lens on a ball head tripod.

If the floor is flat and you have PTGui pro you can simply move your
tripod a bit sideways, point your camera slightly down and shoot the
area where the tripod stood before. You would need to enable viewpoint
correction for this shot. See https://ptgui.com/examples/vptutorial.html

If you don't have pro you would need to shoot the nadir shot from as
close as possible to the position from where you shot the other images.
You can do this hand held or by leaning over the tripod like in this
tutorial: http://www.panoramas.dk/panorama/nadir/

But like John I'd suggest to use a dedicated tripod head to simplify
your panorama stitching greatly. You can buy one, or you can make one
yourself. There are more elaborated versions as well as very simple
ones. Some can be found on https://wiki.panotools.org/Heads

--
Erik Krause
http://www.erik-krause.de

[Melissa Nelson]

Thanks for your help guys. I have seen the special mounts that allow for rotation of the camera around the parallax but I haven't bought that gear...yet. So far PTGui has been able to handle everything I have thrown at it except landscape photos of the night sky. To be fair, it handles daylight landscape photos just fine but I hate making control points so I will do whatever I can to avoid it. I went out in the back yard and tried another tiny planet, taking photos every 10 degrees with three rows. (John, I was only shooting one row of photos before.) It looks like I could take photos every 10 degrees along the horizon, 20 degrees looking halfway down and every 30 degrees looking straight down. I'll need to mask out the tripod or follow your suggestion for moving the tripod and adjusting the viewpoint. Looks like I need to switch to manual focus and lock the AF too. I appreciate the help! Thank you for your suggestions.

[John Houghton]

On Friday, April 22, 2022 at 10:55:41 PM UTC+1 mnels...@hotmail.com wrote:

Thanks for your help guys. I have seen the special mounts that allow for rotation of the camera around the parallax but I haven't bought that gear...yet. So far PTGui has been able to handle everything I have thrown at it except landscape photos of the night sky.

It should be very simple to align images of the sky perfectly since the stars are so far away that there are no parallax effects to worry about.  I repeat what I said previously - it doesn't matter to PTGui whether you shoot landscape or portrait images, or something in between, like 45 degrees orientation.  The lens distortion is the same and can be corrected automatically.  The control points generator may have difficulty in creating points on stars.  If you have a sample set of images, by all means supply a copy of jpegs  (half size would be ok) and we would be happy to see what can be done with them.

 BTW, noting your aversion to creating control points manually, you may like to know that when two images are already roughly aligned, you can then generate more points automatically by dragging out a selection box with the shift key held down, and then right click in the box to bring up an option to "Generate control points here".  Two control points are sufficient to align images, but more points widely spread are needed for the optimizer to evaluate the distortion correction required. 

John

[PTGui Support]

Hi Melissa,

You can't take good panoramas with a ball head, you really need a
panoramic tripod head. The control point generator will work much better
if there's no parallax, so you will hardly need to spend any time fixing
control points. And with parallax it will be impossible to get good
image alignment.

Kind regards,

Joost Nieuwenhuijse
www.ptgui.com

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[John Houghton]

On Friday, April 22, 2022 at 10:55:41 PM UTC+1 mnels...@hotmail.com wrote:

Thanks for your help guys. I have seen the special mounts that allow for rotation of the camera around the parallax but I haven't bought that gear...yet. 

Melissa,  When I started out 20 years ago, I made a  simple head/bracket  to shift the camera back so that the entrance pupil of the lens was on the vertical axis of rotation.  It took me about an hour.  A  few days later, I enhanced it to allow the camera to be mounted in portrait orientation, using an old "L" flash bracket.  (See attached image). The whole thing cost me nothing and it worked perfectly well for single row panoramas and landscape work.  Using a fisheye lens, I even managed to shoot an indoor 360x180 panorama with it by compensating for the inevitable shifts of the no-parallax point by shifting the tripod and altering the height of the centre column.  See it at http://www.johnhpanos.com/spherical/zane5000/zane5000.html .  However,  as Joost points out, you really need a proper spherical panorama head for shooting 360x180 panoramas.  But maybe you (or a handy friend) can improvise something like I did as an interim measure - it does make stitching a lot easier.

John

[Melissa Nelson]

Thanks again for everyone's input. John- awesome idea with the bracket, thank you for sharing. I have a machine shop at work so I'll build something up. Not sure why I didn't think to make something myself. This is a screenshot of the tiny planet I made in the back yard with the ball head. It worked well enough but I can see how more precise equipment would make things easier.