[HDRI] Photosphere 1.6 available

[Gregory J. Ward]

Wow, Rob.  Your friend has some awesome photos, there!

The stitching algorithm I developed can mostly work around parallax  
errors in the input images, so a pano head isn't really necessary.   
I'm a fairly haphazard photographer myself, and rarely find myself at  
the top of some mountain with a full compliment of lenses, tripod and  
attachments.  I just carry my little camera around and occasionally  
wind up someplace that looks like a good spot for a panorama or an  
HDR image (or both), and I start shooting.  By no small coincidence,  
Photosphere is just right for people like me.

For pros, there is much better software available, and some of it is  
free.  Photosphere may be the only one that stitches HDR at the  
moment, but I don't expect that to be true for very long.

-Greg

> From: Rob Guglielmetti <rpg at rumblestrip.org>
> Date: May 11, 2006 1:03:47 PM PDT
>
> Gregory J. Ward wrote:
>
>> Lens distortions don't always cause misalignment in panoramas, as   
>> long as you overlap where the distortions match.  However, you  
>> will  get a kind of "waviness" to lines going from one image to  
>> the next  due to the uncorrected barrel distortion.  You are best  
>> off  experimenting with a few different lenses to see the  
>> results.  I  don't really have enough experience at this point to  
>> advise you past  that.
>
> A friend here at work does a LOT of (LDR) panoramas uses a  
> relatively inexpensive device called the "panosaurus" (http:// 
> gregwired.com/pano/Pano.htm) to help with his panorama sequences.   
> I don't think the device addresses the issue you are speaking to  
> here, but I thought I'd mention it, since my friend's images look  
> amazing (www.mountainworks.net).
>
> - Rob