It’s not actually of Exmouth, but it’s taken from the docks in Exmouth facing towards Starcross (or so my girlfriend, acting as guide for this weekend away, told me). It’s stitched from 5 frames using Hugin, which you will remember is my preferred panorama-stitching software.

I’d have liked to turn left a bit more, but there were a couple of people messing about on a groyne which I thought would pose me problems during stitching, and stand out against the rest of the empty shot. The baskets in the bottom left also irk me somewhat, but cropping them out leaves the setting sun too close to the edge of the frame for my liking, so they remain in.

There are more shots from the weekend in this Flickr set.

Standing at the top of Primrose Hill, overlooking central London, it has become something of a habit of mine to take lots of photos with a view (aha!) to creating panoramas. I took one quite successfully in the summer, and the snow proved too enticing to miss the opportunity.

I didn’t have a tripod with me, so I knew the stitching wouldn’t be the easiest ever, and was quite worried about the huge crowds milling around at the top of the hill – movement at the edge of a frame doesn’t always go down too well! Anyway, I got home and sorted the rest of my photos first, before moving on to a couple of little projects that would include the panorama.

I’ve only recently decided to give Photoshop CS4 a try – there’s a 30-day free trial from the Adobe site, so I figured it was  worth a go. I normally find Lightroom to be sufficient for my needs, and there’s always the GIMP if I need to do anything more intricate (even if it does have to run under X11 on a Mac).

As for panoramas, I actually have four tools installed at the moment. What follows is an almost standardised comparison of all four. I ran the same images through each programme, on the same hardware, one after the other. I can’t promise it’s a perfect comparison, but it should be fair. Some of the problems could have been helped by making sure all the images were exposed exactly the same, same white balance etc, but where’s the fun in that? Much better to see how they cope with slightly different images.

The gallery below is in the same order I review them in – check the photos first, then read my impressions if you need. (Please be aware the photos are pretty massive!) Read the rest of this entry »