I shot some panos at the seashore, and most came out ok. However, several decent (by my limited standards) shots were spoiled by a small kink in the horizon line across the water. I did shoot hand-held rather than tripod. I shoot a lot of panos, but sometimes in a marine environment this problem crops up. In the recent shots, the horizon line also has some distant breakwaters. I've tried all three Lightroom panorama options and varied the order of the selected shots without success. What causes the kink in the horizon? Is it a minute change in camera angle? Is the problem in Lightroom itself; where the reading of the horizon is muddled by the breakwaters, at jetty in the foreground, or other lines that cause confusion? Is there a solution in Lightroom or in taking the shot? Thanks.
A small portion of the pano, with the kink, has been inserted.
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Looking at the three posted "panel" images they are overlapped by ~50%, which is more than sufficient. The actual focus in all three images appears to be good, but all three have sharpness fall-of in their edge and corner areas.
Tamron 18-400mm f/3.5-6.3 Di II VC HLD Lens Image Quality
I created a panorama in LR 7.4 with the three posted JPEG image files with no alignment error (see below) or image softness in the area of the original misalignment.
The lens has curvature of field, which causes th
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I've shot handheld panoramas exactly like this one with no issues. The mismatch is due to the right-side image file being out of focus. LR creates control points that are used to align and stitch adjacent images. The out of focus image apparently doesn't have enough detail to properly match the control points. There's also a small stepped area (Left Arrow) that appears better aligned, but why is it so small. How many shots did you use and how much were they overlapped?
To prevent out-of-focus shots use the manual focus setting on your camera or make sure the focus area/indicator is on the more distinct horizon and not in the clouds.
The full pano was three 24 Mp landscape oriented panels with approximately 1/3 to 1/2 overlap, while holding the Nikon's AE-L/AF-L button down. The focus should have been consistent, but perhaps my finger slipped while moving the camera? The main interest was the cloud formation overhead. Perhaps I should have focused on the 2nd jetty to keep more in focus.
Looking at the three posted "panel" images they are overlapped by ~50%, which is more than sufficient. The actual focus in all three images appears to be good, but all three have sharpness fall-of in their edge and corner areas.
Tamron 18-400mm f/3.5-6.3 Di II VC HLD Lens Image Quality
I created a panorama in LR 7.4 with the three posted JPEG image files with no alignment error (see below) or image softness in the area of the original misalignment.
The lens has curvature of field, which causes the off-axis areas of the image to become progressively softer. Manually setting the lens focus slightly closer may help balance the overall image sharpness. LR Merge to Panaorama uses the image data with no Develop controls applied. Assuming the originals are raw files the JPEGs may have merged better because sharpening and other settings have been applied to them.
The reason you have glitches is because there was movement amongst the three images. Since you cannot take all three images simultaneously, the clouds moved slightly, the water moved more significantly and because you shifted your position as you panned the scene, the beach even has movement relative to the breakwater, so there is nothing exactly the same between the three images and the software is trying to minimize the errors but there will be glitches and where the software decides to put them can be where our eyes find important and they are more noticeable, like the horizon next to the people in your stitch.
If the images weren't as blurry at the extremes you could probably get by with just the first and the third and perhaps have better luck, but you can't due to the lens sharpness falloff.
As Todd already tried and found, stitching the three JPGs you posted works ok without a horizon glitch, but probably there is a cloud and/or beach glitch that are just harder to see:
Using Adobe stitching you're at the mercy of whatever their algorithm finds and there's nothing you can do, really, if you're starting with the raw images. Other software might give you more control over what parts of what images are used.
Here is the screen in the pay-for AutoPanoGiga 4 from www.kolor.com that lets me designate the people-area of the 2nd images as what to keep. Since there wasn't any horizon glitch from the JPGs you posted, I didn't really have to do anything, but if there had been I'd probably click a series of keep-this points along the important areas. The other thing this software allows is adding and deleting match points between the images and I could have added more to the horizon and deleted some from the clouds, perhaps. This software also blends the images better so might actually work with the raw images, but it uses a different raw converter than Adobe, so I'd probably start with JPGs or TIFs exported from Adobe software as input to the software. What you can't get out of other brands of software is a DNG like you do with Adobe's stitching.
As far as what to do with this particular panorama, exporting JPGs and starting with those is one thing. In the future doing more than one pan across the scene so you have multiple sets of starting images is also something, and using a tripod (which is too inconvenient for ad hoc shooting such as this) would help keep the parallax errors, but to completely remove them you'd need a special tripod head, which in this case isn't warranted, more for architectural and inside-home real estate shots that have many straight lines.
One more thing you could do, here, might be to open the panorama in PS along with the center image and hand mask its horizon over the top of what's there in the panorama, if that's possible.
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