ultra high res rendering

[STRAT]

I'd just accept the inevitable and reduce the size of your render. No matter what you do to the bg photo, it's going to look wrong behind a 15,000 pixel render (imho).

 

yup, i tried numerous methods and softwares. they ALL looked more or less identical results. so considering this, the best result in terms of speed and simplicity was to scale up my backround photo in 1 easy step.

 

sounds crude, but the results were next to nothing compaired with all the other methods i tried.

 

as i suspected, and as IC and EBIII did too, no matter how good the software claims to be, you cant re-create what wasn't there in the first place.

 

i'm going to place a slight blur filter over the image to bring it more in line with the blown up backround. the final montage will look fine from 15 yards off, hopefully peeps wont go too much closer to scrutinise.

 

thanks again chaps.

[alexg]

Hi Strat

 

Hope its not too late, but if you said you taken the photos yourself, then my best bet is to retake the bg using 4-6 stitched images. That should boost the resolution to match the render.

A decent photostitch sw will do much better job than shopping around for enlarging sw (and quicker too).

 

If the photo is supplied by your client, then just render as is. What they give is what they get, right?

 

Cheers

AlxG

[STRAT]

Hi Strat

 

Hope its not too late, but if you said you taken the photos yourself, then my best bet is to retake the bg using 4-6 stitched images. That should boost the resolution to match the render.

 

 

Cheers

AlxG

 

a couple of peeps have mentioned shooting the photo in bits, but thinking about it i cant understand how to approach it. ie, i look through the viewfinder and the shot is there ready. how do i shoot it in bits?

[bjornkn]

If you have exactly the view you want you'll need to zoom in a bit. Then you take 4 photos, upper left, upper right, lower left and lower right - and then stitch them together in Photoshop or some stitching program. For such a simple flat stitch you won't need any advanced remapping/projection program. You need to have some overlap, and to keep your camera levelled.

Then you have the same photo, but with almost 4 times as many pixels.

But the question is if you really need it that big...

[STRAT]

i thought that must be the idea. but i'm not happy with zooming in, even optically, as it changes my fied of view perspectives, but i suppose i dont have much choice.

[bjornkn]

It will not change the perspective in your image if you zoom in. Your 4x tiles image will be exactly the same as the single photo.

This can easily be verified if you take 2 photos of the same scene (use a tripod to get exactly the same center?), one with full wide and one with full tele. Crop to the center of the wide lens photo so that you see the same area in both. Compare them and see if you can see any difference perspective-wise. You won't. What you may see though, is that lines may not be parallel, but that is beause most lenses have more or less barrel distortion in wide lenses and pillow distortion in tele. This can also easily be corrected in PS CS2.

 

Anyway, as you say - you dont have much choice..

[STRAT]

yeah. i think it's really the only viable choice. trouble is, it's chucking it down this week

 

choosing the exact same (or very similar) weather conditions will be a load of fun in itself!

[alexg]

If your camera has built in autostitching feature, might be a good idea to use it.

Some camera has 'tile' and 'panoramic' feature software that is very easy to use, otherwise use Panorama Maker - there is a free download at http://www.aptrio.com/Multimedia/Image-Editing/arcsoft-panorama-maker-12218.html or a more powerful PTAssembler http://www.tawbaware.com/ptasmblr_tutorial.htm check out the tutorial for how to do photostitch.

 

Just don't use wide angle lens, zoom in for approx 55mm lens (or higher) for better result, and good luck with the weather.

 

Cheers

[bjornkn]

If you go for the stitching there's one more rule to follow, and that is to set your camera exposure to manual, so that all your images have the same exposure. It will save you a lot of problems later on..

 

I've tried using the panorma mode on Olympus, but was not at all happy with the results. I think you'd be much better off doing it "in post". Or maybe other brands do a better job than Olympus?

 

For quick stitches I use PS CS2, but for more elaborate ones I use Realviz Stitcher, which is somewhat expensive though..

Check out http://www.panoguide.com/products/ for a list of a lot of stitching programs, as well as a lot of other useful info.

[Ian P]

Probably way too late, but I have friends in the design for print industry who swear by Genuine Fractals for blowing stuff up. No Idea how it works or why, and have always been a bit sceptical in the past, but here's a review of it if you have time to read.

 

http://www.designer-info.com/Writing/genuine_fractals.htm

 

I assume you will have already tried blowing up then using unsharp mask in pshop. but if any of this helps then was worth the typing time.