wobbly horizons

I have recently taken and made several panoramas using LR and PS. At first glance they look OK but second glance you can see that the horizons (in my case seascapes) are not straight. They dip in the middle. I have tried a couple of the options available in CS5 for blending the images with no luck. If I have to do it another way, will it be using Transform/distort? Thanks in advance.

This looks like a topic for the Photography forum.

By and large, horizons are not straight but curved. I guess that that is where your problem lies. I haven't encountered this problem myself, but perhaps there is someone who has succeeded in making a panorama out of a seascape (which is where a bowed horizon is most obvious).

Your problem is one in the eye for the Flat Earth Society.

A lot depends on the subject matter in your pano.  If you want verticals to be vertical, horizontals to be horizontal and so on, my experience is that you need to use a different stitcher.  If there are no buildings, and your source shots have minimal unwanted tonal variation, Photoshop might be adequate.  (I do lots of panoramas, they are not on IS).


In the pano world Photoshop is not considered to be the stitcher/blender of choice, but it is still THE tool for any post-stitching processing that may be required - and water (lakes, rivers, etc almost always requires post-stitch processing).


I doubt you will find transform/distort or any of the variants helpful because you are trying to change part of the whole image, and you need to preserve the continuity of edges at the boundaries of any portion that you transform.  You could try doing the transform on the appropriate layer in Photoshop's layered output file; I tried that with CS4 and discovered that the "seamless blending" option changed the stitched layer, but not the layers for constituent images, and in my case the tonal diferences were too large to justify further work.


There are some free tools; google "pano tools" should get you there.  Are you using a panoramic head?


Regards

(Edited on 2012-11-11 08:28:47 by hambagahle)

If you're stitching a large number of images together it can be almost impossible to get a straight horizon. The stitched images end up coming out kinda like a fish-eye photo.

One way around this is to shoot the images in the vertical, not horizontal, and then stitch them in PS. Also use the lens profile tools in LR or ACR to "flatten" the images out and get rid of the barrel distortion before stitching.

Shoot the images from a tripod, and keep the horizon in the middle of the frame. You need to have the camera level, not looking up, not looking down. Otherwise you are asking for trouble. I consider photoshop a join tool not a stitch tool. The individual images need to be warped exactly so before they can be joined. Use the Microsoft Image Composite Editor to do proper stitching - it is incredible. Something I wonder about is why people who have no clue answer posts. They might as well answer, "I don't know - but here is some BS for you".

Have you tried PS transform/wrap tool?


drag a few guild lines over the horizon and other areas, select the whole image, use transform/wrap to correct your horizon.


hope this help.

You have to retouch using transform or warp.

Photoshop's panoramic stitcher works fine, just be careful how you shoot the source material and, as suggested above, make sure you take as much distortion out before compositing.

Hi Pedroec, did any of the above information help you?


Regards