Banff panorama

About:

Banff city seen from Mt Norquay drive, a popular, and easy to get to, spot to have a overview of the Banff city and surroundings.

You can see the city on the left banked by Mt Rundle, on the right the Vermilion lakes (first and second, third is out of view)

 

Yes I know it's another panorama again, but I just can't resist it taking them and post processing it, you really should see this in large, I've uploaded it as a 4800 pixels wide so most people can see it 3 or 4 screen scrollings :)

 

Location:

Banff, Alberta, Canada

This image is also geotagged

 

Technical stuff:

132 bracketed manual shots (0EV at 1/60 f11 focal length 70mm), the 132 shots where shot in 3 rows:top part of the mountains and sky, 1 row in the middle, 1 row for the bottom.

This was processed with PtGui, only 3 shots didn't get control points for some reason which I had do manually, after this the optimizer said: very good. Generated a preview of to review the stitching: I've noticed some moving smoke plume in the trees on the right which resulted in light patches on the trees, so looked for the source images which contained that, used the mask tool in PtGui to remove it from every picture which had it, luckily masked sections were overlapping with good section :)

 

First real run I've let it create a 25000 pixel wide HDR file of 700MB (=195 megapixels) on which Oloneo choked... (It had a problem with memory and I have 8GB in my computer!) Photomatix could handle it because it uses another kind of preview, but I didn't like the results of the tonemapping. So I decided to make it a little smaller, a nice number of 20000 seemed right, and indeed Oloneo could handle it now.

 

Tonemapped and into Photoshop for some final adjustments:

- cropping

- High pass sharpening on everything but sky

- noise reduction on the sky with Topaz

That was the easy part, the sky showed some banding problems from the merging and a slight halo effect around the mountains edges. Several masks and gradient filters, a motion blur and merging of layers I came to a satisfying result, still some slight halo effect but that's inevitable in such a scene as this even without HDR processing.

 

So that's it, now I have a 1.5 GB TIFF file sitting on my harddisk which is 19600x6540 = 128 megapixels and could be printed at 300dpi to a size of 166 cm x 55 cm

 

Usage:

All my images are copyrighted, if you want to use it for anything contact me first.

 

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Any comments, criticism and tips are welcome.

 

This one can only be appreciated in Large, do it a look at the detail, in the original you can spot a 2 canoes on the Bow river!

 

Done