Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Panorama Welding

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[edit] Dams

This material copied from User talk:John Reid:

Hi, John. Thanks for taking a crack at it. The images aren't low quality, I just made a low quality snapshot of the bad panorama, so that you could see the problem. I took them with an 8MP camera, so I think they're pretty good. They're not tiffs, just jpgs at the highest setting. I uploaded some different images for you to try. The problem is more severe with them, but it would be a far more useful panorama to have. If it doesn't work, I can find some pictures that are not very bad but would still be good to have. I'm going offline in a minute, so I might not get back to you right away. Thank you very much, Kjkolb 10:20, 13 February 2006 (UTC)


Okay; this took me about 20 min of Photoshop time, not counting wrench-twiddling. Not much point investing real effort in it but you can see what can be done.
Problems with these images include color balance and rotate; you may also have chosen the incorrect focal length leading to geometric distortion. All these errors are slight and mostly correctable or unnoticeable. Next time you shoot, use a tripod with a smooth pan head and be absolutely sure it's level and firmly seated before starting the series. Use a cable release; go full manual on all controls and don't reset them between shots for any reason. (Unless you're going to try to pan around from a distant scene to a foreground, you madman.) The lens issue is something else; at bottom there is no perfect resolution to the problem, just as the round Earth can never be mapped properly on flat paper. Stick to distant subjects and a long lens; keep the number of degrees of pan between images low.
Much more serious is the problem of excessive overlap. You did not pan sufficiently between the two images, so they contain largely the same scene. It's probably better to aim for a 20-30% overlap instead of the 70% you have here. Any amount of effort welding the panorama is wasted for the small payoff.
Another issue is the water in the scene. I ran the seam down a wide stretch of foreground water rather than through the rocks to the left. The water moves; but the rocks are in the foreground and the relative pincushion distortion is extreme. Everything considered, the test is not too bad. But water in motion is never going to match up very well; it's different in every shot. Key to this kind of work is to run the seam through less-detailed areas. Note that I've avoided entirely the complex control structure and gone through the dam proper; where the weld is nearly invisible. (By the way, what look like very obvious welds are actually reflections of the control structure; the actual seam runs between them.)
If you're not going to reshoot, you need to select pairs or triples of shots that maintain proper overlap of about 20%; with that overlap avoiding as much as possible complex detail, including water and absolutely all motion (such as the bobbing warning buoy line in the middleground). Assuming the color balance, skew, pincushion, and rotate errors aren't any worse than in the test sources, welding should work out fine.
One problem you may have with my work is that you seem to have even larger images on hand. I don't quite understand all your comment, but that's what I read from it. I can manipulate large images but I have trouble compressing them to HVS ProJPEG. We might want to drag another party into this end of the job; or you can try your hand yourself. Please remember that you'll get fairly fine quality from reasonable compression ratios. Each of your source files weighs in at over 5 Mb; that's probably excessive for upload to WP. If I hadn't scaled it down, the test file might have come to about 350K. If you're giving me the best possible starting file, that's fine; I don't mind. But when the work is done and ready to convert, best we keep the file size within sane bounds. John Reid 08:37, 16 February 2006 (UTC)


Image:Badpanorama.jpg
Sorry for the confusion. Those are the best images I have. The confusion started when I said my example panorama was lower quality so it would upload fast, and you thought I meant that the source pictures were low quality. I tried to explain that the source images were pretty good quality, but I guess I just confused you more. Anyway, thanks for all of your work and I'll try your suggestions. -- Kjkolb 09:58, 21 February 2006 (UTC)
Now I'm completely baffled. Let's just leave this file size issue aside for the moment. I don't know why you gave me DavisDam1 and DSCN0172 to work with; poor choices, sorry. Upload the components of Badpanorama; I can do nothing with the botched output. I see no reason why this cannot be improved. John Reid 16:35, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Thanks very much for the offer, I really appreciate it. However, I'm going to try to get better images using the suggestions you gave me. Thanks again, Kjkolb 10:33, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

That's cool; meanwhile upload some stuff, okay? We can work together on this at the same time. John Reid 17:09, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Project directory

Hello. The WikiProject Council has recently updated the Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory. This new directory includes a variety of categories and subcategories which will, with luck, potentially draw new members to the projects who are interested in those specific subjects. Please review the directory and make any changes to the entries for your project that you see fit. There is also a directory of portals, at User:B2T2/Portal, listing all the existing portals. Feel free to add any of them to the portals or comments section of your entries in the directory. The three columns regarding assessment, peer review, and collaboration are included in the directory for both the use of the projects themselves and for that of others. Having such departments will allow a project to more quickly and easily identify its most important articles and its articles in greatest need of improvement. If you have not already done so, please consider whether your project would benefit from having departments which deal in these matters. It is my hope that all the changes to the directory can be finished by the first of next month. Please feel free to make any changes you see fit to the entries for your project before then. If you should have any questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you. B2T2 14:10, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia Day Awards

Hello, all. It was initially my hope to try to have this done as part of Esperanza's proposal for an appreciation week to end on Wikipedia Day, January 15. However, several people have once again proposed the entirety of Esperanza for deletion, so that might not work. It was the intention of the Appreciation Week proposal to set aside a given time when the various individuals who have made significant, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia would be recognized and honored. I believe that, with some effort, this could still be done. My proposal is to, with luck, try to organize the various WikiProjects and other entities of wikipedia to take part in a larger celebrartion of its contributors to take place in January, probably beginning January 15, 2007. I have created yet another new subpage for myself (a weakness of mine, I'm afraid) at User talk:Badbilltucker/Appreciation Week where I would greatly appreciate any indications from the members of this project as to whether and how they might be willing and/or able to assist in recognizing the contributions of our editors. Thank you for your attention. Badbilltucker 19:11, 30 December 2006 (UTC)