How can I stitch a gigapixel panorama when some frames are shot at very different focal lengths and include featureless water?

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I’m building a very large panorama from Cristo Rei in Lisbon. Most of the scene was shot with a telephoto lens around 75mm, with some details at 300mm, but I used a wider 18mm lens for the river because Hugin struggled to find control points on water. Now Hugin can’t match or scale the wide river frames to the telephoto frames, and upscaling them enough uses too much RAM on my Linux system.

What’s the best way to handle a panorama that mixes very different focal lengths, especially where large areas are just water with few features? Can this be done in Hugin, and if so, what workflow should I use?

user7736 · Answer

Question: How do photographers usualy make rivers in gigapixel photos?

Answer: They buy a Gigapan robot which shoots a structured panorama, i.e. a regular one in say a 5x5 grid and then use the software that came with their robot to merge the images. Having said that though, if you have such a structured layout, you could use Microsoft ICE just as well (as you can tell it how the images were shot). Here is an example of the SLR version of a Gigapan robot: http://gigapan.com/cms/shop/epic-pro (or maybe even two - I think a Dubai shot used two cameras on two bots)

Having said that, I managed to create an image that would be 400MP cropped (500MP uncropped with "blank spots) that included a river by just handholding in Germany. However I never had just water in the image but always some other background that enabled the software to stitch it (with only tiny errors). (used a 70mm lens that that time)

If you really want to regularly shoot Gigapixel images, I don't think there is a way around getting one of those machines. If you just want to shoot one every now and then, the best option is to buy a good old fashioned tripod head (like a Manfrotto 460MG) and then shoot an image say every 2 degrees, manually implementing the approach of the gigapan robot. Having said that though, you also want a lens with little vignetting, I tired doing that in Germany as well with a cheap old lens at 300mm and I just couldn't merge the images because of that... (and possibly not sharp enough), but if you have successfully created smaller panoramas, your lenses should be fine.

Wit respect to software: I personally use either Photoshop CS4 or Microsoft ICE with none coming out as a clear leader in terms of quality, however neither will work on Linux. I suspect you will find it a lot easier to find good software for Windows or potentially an apple product as these are more predominant amongst photographers than Linux.

How can I stitch a gigapixel panorama when some frames are shot at very different focal lengths and include featureless water?

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