Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook

8.5. Stage 5

8.5.1. Rendering and export

The "montage-assembly" in Stitcher took less than 30 minutes. It was now time to render the panorama. I always start by making a render in Cubic QuickTime VR (Cubic QTVR) to check the quality of the montage and spot any mistakes I may have missed during partial renders. Depending on the result, this "rough draft" lets me modify the stitch between certain photographs, or readjust the horizon.

With this particular photograph, I immediately noticed that the reflections on the water looked wrong. As I feared, the reflections of the building façades overlapped in ways that made no sense at all, greatly complicating the appearance of the photograph and robbing it of all plausibility.

If I had been using Stitcher 3.5, the jig would have been up at this point, because that version's Artifact Removal tool can't handle this kind of problem. Luckily, I had a brand-new option available in Stitcher 4.

Stitcher 3.5's Artifact Removal tool can eliminate certain artifacts; for example, if objects or people move between two shots. Renamed the Stencil tool in Version 4, it has been completely rethought and greatly improved. It now spares you from using another graphic application to get rid of imperfections.

With Version 4, Stitcher can also export panoramas in PSDformat. It exports multi-layer files, turning each photograph into a layer with its own layer mask. This remarkable advance gives you much greater post-production control than theprevious version, ...