Panorama Stitching Challenge: Telephone Wires and Parallax
The 8-shot panorama above features telephone lines that are not stitching correctly in Photoshop CS6 or PTGui 9 with the standard software settings. The images were shot with an 18mm Olympus lens mounted vertically on a 5D Mark II. The camera was on a nodal slide, but the setting wasn't perfect. The power lines were also moving in the wind.
Do you have a good panorama stitching technique for correcting parallax error in long sections of telephone wires? The warp tool and masking in Photoshop is too tedious. There has to be a better way. Thanks for taking the time to give this stitch a try -- I'll be curious to see if anyone has a good way to fix the wires!
Update: Below are 2 techniques to solve the powerline panorama problem:
1. Puppet Warp to the rescue -- Over on fredmiranda.com, a photographer from Mexico who goes by the name Eyeball provided an excellent step-by-step technique for fixing power lines using Puppet Warp:
- Do a copy merge of a section of the power line up to the break. You want to select a long enough piece of the line that the slight change in direction won't be noticed.
- Paste to a new layer.
- Do an Edit>Puppet Warp on the layer with the piece of power line. Select a pivot point at each end of the segment as close to the line as possible.
- Move the end of the line to eliminate the discontinuity.
- Accept the Puppet Warp change.
- Use a quick clone edit to remove any fuzziness around where the line connects.
2. PTGui's horizontal control points -- On panoguide.com, photographer John Houghton from the UK provided a PTGui technique using horizontal control points and an optimizer plugin for PTGui from 2001. This also worked quite nicely. John went the extra mile and provided a PTGui file so I could see his technique.
One thing I love about panoramas is the wonderful community of photographers who will go out of their way to help you. Thanks to Eyeball and John for their help with the powerline panorama problem. Cheers!