Tutorial 12

Having problems with you manual fisheye lens (like the Samyang / Rokinon / Bower 8mm or Peleng 8mm) getting started in your stitching software? Well, stitches require an initial “idea” of the focal length (and lens type) used — and they try to take that information from the EXIF data.

… But if you use a manual lens, this relevant information will be missing. In that case, it’s best to manually specify the appropriate values.

This tutorial shows you quickly how to manually set the appropriate parameters.


Oh, and here’s that overview picture again.

overview graphic

10 Comments on “Tutorial 12

  1. dear Florian, first of all I would like to say how happy I am with your tutorials, not many photographers are willing to help others on their way with panoramas. Now I still have a problem with my Nikon aps (c) and the Samyang 8mm / f3.5. All pictures are made with the Nodal ninja head, are exactly aligned and level, all manually, photos loaded in PTGui, As indicated as a 9mm on 1.5 and as full frame. unfortunately I still get stitch errors and especially above in the panorama. What am I doing wrong?
    Thank you in advance for your help.

    • Dear Ernst Paul, thanks for reaching out — I responded to you directly via email.

      • Thanks so much Florian for this really amazing tutorial, would you please help me on the issue happened with Ernst Paul, i have a same senario. using Nikon D5300, 9mm, 1.5, Full frame photo. and thanks in advance for your help.

  2. I use “Samyang 12mm F2.8” with Sony a7iii (Full Frame) what Focal Length i should enter. Coz i am also suffering with the same issue.

    Thank You.

    • I have no experience with that lens, but I assume 12mm should be a good start?

  3. Hi Florian
    I am currently producing 360 tours of the interiors of caravans. I’m using a Samyang 12mm ff fisheye mounted on a Canon 5d 2. I capture six images plus one zenith, I’m not capturing a nadir image. CR2 files are processed and stitched using PTGui. In general the set up works well. However I have tried in vain to eradicate small stitching errors without success. Reading your comments and others on the web it would appear that a NPP is not achievable for fisheye lenses. The errors can be corrected using Photoshop, however since I have up to 180 tours to process I’d prefer a solution to get them right first time.

    I’d prefer not to go to a circular fisheye as this limits the use of individual files for alternate presentations ( I appreciate fewer images would result in fewer errors).

    What are your thoughts on using a Samyang 10mm 3.5 lens which produces a rectilinear image with no distortion. I’d increase the number of shots, incline the camera down slightly and take an extra zeour time.nith image.

    Thanks for y

    • Hi Graham, you can try the 10mm rectilinear lens, but short of using a 2-axis robot for taking the images, I don’t think it will be a sustainable solution either, since you be tripling the amount of images needed for each panorama. See if you can improve further on the pano head calibration instead – rather than doing the calibration visually, try using a more empiric approach such as this: https://www.ptgui.com/cullman_noparallax.pdf. That means, shoot a series of panos of a representative scene over and over again varying (and writing down…) the pano head settings, then checking in PTGui which setting gives the best result, both in terms of optimiser values and/or visually. Do this with several scenes to get best results. Tedious, but can give very good results!

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