Warp?

[Rawcoll]

Usually when I make casual attempts at producing a panorama (hand held), I end up with an image which narrows at the ends, for example:

Perveril Castle.jpg (17.47 KiB) Viewed 3120 times

I could just crop it down so as to get rid of the blank areas, but that loses some of the image. What I would like to do is stretch just the ends to fill the voids. The Warp transformation looks to be a likely contender but I can see no way of pinning the warp so as to confine it just to the ends. Does anyone have any solution please?

Ian

[jsachs]

Depending on the software you are using to create panoramas, you could try cylindrical perspective instead of rectilinear as this produces less distortion at the edges. You may already be doing this.

You are probably better off trying to clone some detail into the corners than trying to stretch the image, but if you do want to stretch the image, you could use the lens distortion transformation to pull the corners out. Just arrange control points along the edge of where the image ends. This will introduce an appropriate amount of pincushion distortion to make the image rectangular. This technique might work a little better if you apply it before doing any cropping.

The next time you shoot a panorama try to anticipate that you need extra space at the top and bottom of the frame to avoid this problem.

[Rawcoll]

Thank you Jonathan. I've used both Arcsoft Panorama Maker 3 and Microsoft Ice. The latter did allow me to try out different perspectives but it didn't solve the problem.

I had a quick look at the Lens Distortion transformation but I think it would need a fair bit of practise to get it to produce the result you achieved. Clearly I need to persevere with that.

I also tried applying the warp transformation twice in succession, once for the left hand end and once for the right hand end, and that might be the best 'quick fix'. But as you suggest, applying it to the un-cropped file is the best approach.

Peveril Castle warp.jpg (22.25 KiB) Viewed 3080 times

[jsachs]

Doing warp twice is a clever idea. You can do it in one pass as follows:

Perveril Castle.jpg (28.15 KiB) Viewed 3030 times

When you are done with the warp, run the Sharpen transformation with the basic Sharpen setting to restore the slight blurring caused by warp.