GigaPan – Factory
A while back, I was commissioned to create a GigaPan (wiki) of a machine shop/factory in Coeur d’Alene as a fund raiser for our trip to Kansas City, Missouri. I have attempted these in the past (2 to be exact), and they came out decent, however none have been great. On this one, I was able to use a Canon 70-200 f/2.8L borrowed from my teacher. This, for one thing, allowed the images to be sharper. Also, I had more ambient light this time, because the two past ones were shot in the evening while it was overcast. The factory had many artificial lights available, as well as bright sunlight coming through the garage doors (overexposed in the images).
This project has taken many hours, and each time I do one, I vow to myself that I will never again do it without a machine, but each time I forget how hard to are to edit. With a GigaPan Machine, it calculates the distance to move the tripod each time, so it can easily merge the images together in the computer. However, when doing it manually, I have to do it by eye, and guess how far to move it each time. As a result, there is one spot where there is no image. This was unfortunate as it was in a spot where I couldn’t easily clone in image from other areas.
The other reason it took so long is that once the image is done, Photoshop takes a century to save the image as a tiff — First there is “Generating Full Resolution Composite,” then it has to generate preview, then it has to prepare to save, and lastly it has to “Save Large Document Format.” LDF is a format like PSD, however it doesn’t have a 2GB cap on each file, so you can save enormous images to the file container. In this case, the document was 9.5GB.
After saving the document, the upload took a very long time as the final compressed Tiff file was 1.3 gb. I uploaded the panorama to GigaPan.org using their uploader while I was staying at a hotel, and as a result, it took quite a long time using their insanely fast 120kbps connection.
Anyway, the panorama turned out nice, and I am happy to have it finished as it took so long to complete.
–Scott
