[week 5]
|
Panoramas Tools Used Shame, shame, shame on my heros at Jasc! I have held off opening the zip file of AfterShots until I found a reason to try it in class. First, I go to open it to try stitching and I see that, without ever unzipping, it has expired. What a pain. I download again...almost two hours on dial-up. I unzip and the first thing I spot is that it requires IE 5.0 or later for web pages and stuff. Now, I HATE overbloated, invasive, secuity hole ridden IE. I have the version that came on this computer (4.79 something) ONLY because I need some version to check webpages. I would dump it if I could. I keep the latest versions of Netscape and Opera and never, no never use IE for browsing, or email or anything other than an page checker. When I spot a software that obviously writes IE specific codes, I avoid it like the plague. It's a pet peeve of mine. So, AfterShots, which I hadn't seen any special features of which interested me, was deleted from my system without further ado. I tried the little stitching program that came with my camera. Okay, off my soapbox and on with the lesson. I had reason to be in the downtown area early this morning, so I grabbed my camera as I was heading out the door. The skys were grey and rain was spitting a little, but I wanted to try a skyline and a dragon and decided colors could be brightened and corrected in good old PSP. My main purpose was to try the stictching feature on the camera. The skyline shots I *really* wanted would have been from the left or right end of this shot. (One has the Wm. Strictland designed State Capitol Bldg. in the forground and the other has what is loving called the *bat building*...spot it?...as it's centerpiece.) The only problem is that both spots I know of that have the killer view are freeway bridges....not a good place to stop and fiddle with a camera. LOL, I tried the top of a parking garage that my better half told me about. I realized, after the fact, that this first one could have been successfully done in one frame, but as the exercise is the seam and stitching, I continued with the shots I had. It has been run through all the auto color corrections, fade correction, clarify, manual color correction added to the sky to try and kill the grey drizzly look and finally unsharp mask after resize. The lower section that has parking garage and etc. has been cropped out. Unfortunately, this is not a great composition, but the stitching seemed to work rather painlessly and easily in the Canon software. (All shots massively reduced in size and compressed at 30% for webviewing.) Original unretouched shots:
This one is from a hillside in Centennial Park. Our version of the Parthenon in the foreground. I tried to get as many of the powerlines out as possible and in a croppable position. Not much to be done about street lights unless I want to fiddle with cloning, and I don't think this image warrants the extra work. Once again, I might have gotten what I wanted in one frame. Image has been run through all the auto corrections & clarified, cropped and reduced in size then unsharp mask applied. Original unretouched shots:
You can't see the amazing detail of the dragon in this shot...I got a few of those this morning as well, but they don't work with the assignement of panoramic shots. *wink* I could not seem to get the sidewalk to line up. As I am using the Canon stitcher, but not the Canon viewer , which I believe shows which pictures were originally snapped together, I "may" have the wrong central shot...gotta fool with this more. BUT, I didn't want that silly old sidewalk anyway. Once again, the photo was run through auto corrections, clarify, resize and unsharp mask applied. Original unretouched photos:
Conclusions about stitching. I think I need to play with this one a lot more to get a good handle on the feature. I suppose I should load the matching viewer, as I am having trouble if I have snapped several versions figuring out which parts match. The stitching itself seems very simple and appears to work quite easily. Once again, the malfunction in the mix is ME! Practice, practice, practice.... I think this may come in handy for our beach trip in a couple of weeks. :-) :-) Okay, I can't stand it...this dragon is way too cool. Wanna see
a couple of details? Red Eye Removal Tools Used Now I want you to know that my *brilliant owner* learned almost as soon as the wicked silver box which he would like to bury in wet litter [his name for the camera] arrived in his domain, to close his eyes as soon as I picked it up. Since I had discarded all the earlier furry globs with flash eye...not really *red* eye, I had to torture him again tonight. After a series of closed eye shots I managed to sneak a couple. I kinda LIKE the color a flash turns his eye...I think it portrays his disdain of being photographed well. But we "fixed" it with PSP anyway. [Note: Flash tended to "blow out" the whites and the front of the photo in general at this close range.]
One more bit of flashed out fuzzy cat-ti-tude at it's best.
Fearing sever punishment, I put away the camera for the night and the cat and I shall both rest. Sweet dreams, Farron and the disdainful _^..^_
|
||||||||||||||||||
