[HDRI] Photosphere 1.6 available

[Gregory J. Ward]

Hi Kirk,

Just to clarify -- you don't have to take a matching set of exposures  
if you're shooting your panoramas in HDR.  Just do whatever you have  
to to get a good set of exposures in each direction, and they should  
stitch together fine.  It's only LDR images that require manual  
settings, and you only get one in that case, so you need to choose  
carefully.

I thought about choosing feature points instead of areas, but the  
feedback would have been difficult since Photosphere doesn't show you  
what point you've chosen and forgets when you switch between images.   
I find myself going back and forth to check my feature selections,  
and if they were missing or always disappearing it would only make  
the process more painful....

-Greg

> From: Kirk Thibault <kthibault at biomechanicsinc.com>
> Date: May 11, 2006 6:49:14 AM PDT
>
> So if I do a little experimentation ahead of time and establish a  
> manual set of exposures, and do that same set across all of the  
> images I intend to stitch together, it sounds like Photosphere will  
> make the HDRs and combine them in a way that will take care of  
> balancing the exposure (tone-mapping exposure) across the panorama.
>
> Also - for anyone trying it out, it took me a few tries to figure  
> out that you have to select (click-drag) a small portion of the  
> scene when designating matching feature points (versus simply  
> clicking on a feature).
>
> Re: barrel distortion - it sounds like if I try to take all of my  
> LDRs into Photoshop and use the Lens Correction filter to remove  
> barrel distortion, then I will lose important image info that  
> Photosphere uses to do its magic.  I'll try a couple of different  
> focal lengths with a simple LDR panorama and see what I get wrt  
> stitching distorted images.  I'll also try varying the overlap amount.
>
> Pretty cool.
>
> kirk