Perfect Panorama Ebook

Perfect Panorama

Learn How to Make Beautiful Wide Angle
Panoramic Photographs in Minutes - Using Your Own Ordinary Camera - Even if You've Never
Used Photo Software Before.

How often have you come home from your vacation with dozens or even hundreds of photos, only to feel disappointed that somehow your snapshots never seem to capture the grandeur of the sights you've seen?

Suppose you could follow a simple series of fully illustrated, absolute step-by-step instructions, and learn how to shoot a series of frames, then join them seamlessly together into a fantastic panoramic scene like the one above.

Imagine how you'll feel when your friends ask where you bought your gorgeous new eight foot panoramic photo canvas, and you tell them you created it yourself with photos from your last vacation!

Sounds too good to be true?

Well, it isn't if you have the right tools and know how to use them.

That's where I can help.

Introducing ...

The Absolute Step-by-Step Guide to the Perfect Panorama

Do you want to learn how to use your ordinary digital or film camera to go wide, and transform your landscape photos from bland to grand?

With the easy to follow, fully illustrated instructions in this brand new e-Book, The Absolute Step-by-Step Guide to the Perfect Panorama, you'll quickly master the basics of creating stunning panoramic images like the one above.

Even if you've never used photo software before.

Guaranteed!

Hi, Denis Knight here.

I'm a landscape photographer and professional technical author and software support consultant.

In 1991 I took the trip of a lifetime, visiting fantastic scenic locations like the Grand Canyon, Yosemite Valley, Hawaii, and more. I shot literally hundreds of photos. But I was constantly frustrated by the tiny fraction of the scene I could fit in my viewfinder. I knew these photos were never going to do the scene justice!

In desperation I decided to shoot some panoramic sequences, turning the camera a few degrees between each shot. I hoped that when I got the prints developed, I might be able to paste them together and give people a better sense of the grand sights I had witnessed.

And I had some success with it. When I got home, by painstakingly matching up the photos and carefully cutting them out with a scalpel, I was able to put together some basic scenes like this one:

Okay, you get a better idea of the view, but it's not exactly art, is it?

Try framing that and hanging it on your wall!

My panoramic photos ended up in a shoe box on the top shelf.

Years later, I bought my first photo scanner and I wondered if there might be a way to put my panoramas together on the computer. I found some software and gave it a try, but I ran into a lot of problems. The software could stitch my photos together, but the joins showed up as light and dark bands, and there was a lot of 'ghosting' in the overlap areas. After hours of painstaking work in Photoshop, carefully fixing up some of the worst problems, I had put together one half-decent panorama. But I still had dozens more in the shoe box!

It was just too slow.

The shoe box went back on the shelf.

Then in April 2008, at my fortieth birthday party, I jumped up onto a garden table to take a photo of all the guests who had just finished singing 'Happy Birthday'. They were spread out across the whole yard, and everyone was smiling and happy.

It was a great scene!

But I knew I could never fit it into a single shot. What the heck! I snapped off two photos and thought, maybe I can put these together on the computer.

Later I fired up the same software I had tried years before. I fed in the two photos and waited while it did its thing. Unfortunately the results were not good! Again, the join was really obvious, and even worse, some of the kids in the photo had moved while I was setting up the second shot, and they showed up in the finished panorama as blurry 'ghosts'. It was unusable.

But this time, I didn't give up. I spent hours searching the web - downloading, installing and trying out one piece of software after another.

Finally, I hit gold!

I tried one more program, and I couldn't believe how easy it was to use, and what a great job it did! I loaded the pictures, hit the button, and pow!

The scene jumped right out at me.

Where was the join? I couldn't see it. What about the ghostly kids? Gone! This software had done a near perfect job in seconds. When I looked closely I could see a couple of minor problems, but with a few minutes of tweaking, I had a great image.

I saved my panorama, sent it off to an on-line lab for printing, and now I have a fantastic framed memento of my big day hanging on the wall. All my friends comment on it and ask me how I managed to create such a terrific shot.

The Absolute Step-by-Step Guide to the Perfect Panorama.

This 88 page, full color e-Book is packed with fully illustrated, absolute step-by-step instructions, like the ones on these sample pages:

With its easy to read text and simple, uncluttered layout, my e-Book is perfect for on-screen reading, and can also be printed in color or black-and-white.

I've gathered up loads of helpful tips about creating your own panoramas, as well as creating 5 complete step-by-step tutorials, with downloadable sample images, to guide you in creating different types of panoramas.

This book is the only resource of its kind currently available on the internet.

There are other books out there filled with gorgeous images by panoramic photographers much more talented than me - but they don't tell you how to create your own panoramas!

And there are interesting web sites packed with reviews, theories, background information and expensive gadgets, all competing for your attention. You could spend weeks reading all that information and wind up more confused than when you started.

But my book simply lays out what you need to do to create your own panoramas, in plain, simple, step-by-step language that anyone can follow.

And, it's fully illustrated.

Plus, each tutorial comes with its own sample photos that you can download and use to follow along, every step of the way.

My book is the only one of its kind, and I'm regularly updating it to make sure it stays current.

Here are just some of the great secrets you'll discover -

• What kind of camera do you need to create your own panoramas?
  
  Hint: You don't need an expensive Digital SLR camera to get great results if you follow my methods.
  
• How to create stunning panoramic photo murals up to eight feet wide, by turning your ordinary 4 megapixel camera into a 40 megapixel ultrawide monster.
  
• Is it essential to use a tripod?
  
  Hint: You can get excellent results without a tripod by following the three simple guidelines in my 'Photo Shooting Tip #5' in Chapter 1 of the book.
  
• Where to find an affordable, easy to use software package that can you download today for a free, fully functional trial with no watermarks, that will give you great results in minutes - so that you can get started right now and create as many panoramas as you want for 15 days without paying another cent.
  
  Plus, this software is available for both Windows and Macintosh.
  
• The top 14 photo shooting secrets for creating the perfect panorama, including what you can do do before you even leave home, to ensure you come back from your next vacation with the perfect panorama.
  
• How to select and arrange your photos, then automatically stitch them together into a panorama and check your results for common defects.
  
• How to manually adjust the panorama stitching points and blending path for perfect results, which means you'll never by stumped by panorama stitching errors or ghosting again.
  
• How to straighten and crop your panorama, and even adjust the brightness and contrast all within the panorama software, which means you can get great results without having to master any other software tools.
  
• How to add a virtual frame and title, and then print your panorama.
  
• How to create 360° virtual tour style panoramas, and save them as in quicktime, flash or java format, which means now you, too can create your own virtual tours and publish them on the internet.
  
• How to create seamless panoramic group photos and other scenes of moving people, without ghosting or other common problems, which means your options for shooting at parties and in public places just got a whole lot wider.
  
• Seven steps you should do before shooting every panorama. Once you start applying these simple rules, your results will improve out of sight!
  
• A simple but easily overlooked trick to help you make sense of your photos when you're looking at them on your computer.
  
• A quick camera setting that can help you line up your photos perfectly with just the right amount of overlap, which means you'll never lose track of your subject half way through a series of shots again.
  
• How you can still shoot with your widest zoom setting, even if your camera lens suffers from distortion or vignetting at wide angles.
  
• When can you get away without using a tripod, and when it it really essential to use one?
  
• What are the five golden rules for hand held shooting which can help you get good results without a tripod in most cases?
  
• What's the best time of day for shooting 360 degree landscape panoramas, and why?
  
• How to increase your vertical field of view by 50% without any new lenses or attachments.
  
• Another simple trick to help you keep track of your panoramic sequences on the computer, which means no more time wasted staring at dozens or hundreds of nearly identical shots, trying to work out where one sequence ends and the next one begins.
  
• What are the three main formats for saving and viewing 360 degree panoramas, and what are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

Interested in indoor panoramas for real estate or virtual tours?

Don't miss these gems from Chapter 6 -

• What is parallax error, what causes it, how does it affect your panoramas, and how can you eliminate it?
  
• How to deal with the five biggest problems you'll face when trying to shoot panoramas indoors.
  
• How to get great results using a flash indoors, by avoiding these three big problems that can make your flash-lit photos unstitchable.
  
• Find out what equipment a professional real estate photographer uses to create gorgeous high resolution indoor panoramas - and read his comments about his camera, flash, lens, tripod, panoramic head, software, and the special gadget that he says is 'The best $50 I ever spent.'
  
• Learn how to publish and share your panoramas on the internet using a free virtual tour web site, with complete details on how to prepare your image for publishing, how to sign up on the web site, create a tour, locate your tour on the map, add hotspots and attach your panoramas.

Still having problems? Check out these troubleshooting tips from Chapter 9 -

• Four easy steps to eliminate vertical banding, which means you'll never be plagued by those highly visible vertical seams in your skies again.
  
• What's the cause of those curved dark areas in your panoramas; and four different ways of getting rid of them.
  
• Why your panoramas might end up with fuzzy blurry ghosts and how you can get rid of them.
  
• The four main causes, and three simple solutions for panorama stitching errors (including the one simple secret that can eliminate most of your stitching problems in a single stroke). Get your head around these and you'll never again have to say "Yikes! My panorama is a jumbled mess! What can I do?"
  
• What to do if you notice bands of strange colors in your finished panorama that weren't there in the original photos.
  
• Three simple ways to avoid the dreaded curved horizon effect, which means you won't need to waste any more time post-processing your panoramas in photo editing software trying to straighten them out.

More...