Stereographic Fun Time

I found some more photos from my recent trip to the French Alps that needed editing. I had a bit of spare time last night so I got to work.

The First one below was a fairly easy job. There was minimal tweaking the only thing I had to remove from the stitched images was my shadow. This was really easy with this shot because snow is dead easy to clone with out being noticeable.

The second image on the other hand was a real mission! I got 8 friends to stand around me while I took the photos. This was a similar concept to this photo I took a few months back. It’s always difficult to take stereographic photos with close subjects because of parallax errors that occur between the shots.

So I started off with 10 images. One of each person and one of the Nadir and Zenith (floor and sky)

I imported these photos into a program called PTGui and ran the auto point finder. This looks at matching features in the photos and roughly aligns them. Below you can see  how the photos are arranged. Some times you will need to manually add points to the photos to help the program work out where they are meant to be.

Below is the raw equirectangular image rendered straight out of PTGui. I have circled all the obvious errors in the image. The main problems being the shadows on the floor. While in this view I dealt with the smaller problems like the missing hand and some lens glare.

I then saved the above image and imported in to Hugin. I then moved the position of the projection point so the floor is at the centre of the image. This allows me to make changes to it with out the image being too distorted in the area of work.

I took the above image into PS and started making the changes. I took parts of the shadows from the original images and over laid them. I then used warp to distort and align it to the other image. I then used various masks to blend the two image. Below is the finished result.

I then Imported the above image one more time into Hugin and used the drag tool to straighten it all back out again. I now have a level equirectangular image that I use to create a stereographic projection or an 360º interactive image.

Below are two more examples of stereographic projections using the above equirectangular image.

I’m pretty pleased with the overall results of this one. I was a little sceptical to whether it would work or not. But with practice I’m getting better at using the tricks of PS. No doubt there’s still more I could do to improve this image but for now it will do.

For some high res versions head to my Flickr.