Hi Ken

Getting panos perfect is not always too easy... using a panoramic tripod head would help a lot, but these are extremely expensive, unless you have some means of making your own. I've seen an article on a DIY pano head made from wood and scraps, and I guess this is the way to go if you will be making one or two panos. The reason why these pano heads give good results is that it decreases the work load of stitching software dramatically by virtually eliminating parallax errors.

Taking the pano photos when the sun is at a high point in the sky (near noon) helps too as the tripod and your shadow is smaller and therefore easier to edit out.

The first two panos that I made took more than a hundred 8M pixel photos - I wanted to get as much quality into the pano as possible, and therefore the photos were taken at a longer focal length and that is why so many were needed. With good optics, shorter focal length and high mpixels, less photos would be required to construct your pano, at a very acceptable image quality.

Also, remember to set your camera's exposure levels manually to ensure that it remains the same for all shots. It's also a good idea to use a fairly small aperture size as the depth of field would then be longer and therefore more of the photo is in focus, which will also simplify the stitching process, especially with the process of control point identification.

I've also read somewhere that it is a mistake to specify your desired resolution (i.e. 8192 pixels wide) in the stitching software as they often utilize bad interpolation routines. To preserve your image quality better, specify your end result to be large, and resize the output pano using image software like Gimp or PS. The downside of this is that the stitching process takes much much longer to complete.

I hope this was of help.


Regards