Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook [Paperback]

Bertrand Bodin (Author), Arnaud Frich (Author), Albert Lemoine (Author), William Rodarmor (Translator)

Book Description

Series: Designers Notebook | Publication Date: May 1, 2005

In this full-color Designer's Notebook, eight expert French photographers reveal their secrets in using Photoshop and a collection of dedicated applications to create extraordinary panoramic photos--including some amazing 360-degree images. For anyone involved with digital imagery or animation, this groundbreaking volume demonstrates a new way of thinking about what's possible and what's required to produce these images.

Originally published in France, "Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook" is available in English for the first time. Part art book, part how-to guide, this stunning work takes you right into the studio and sits you down next to renowned digital artists as they advance step-by-step toward their final images. The showcased pieces are inspiring and avant-garde, and the techniques are instructive for a wide range of amateur and professional photographers, graphic designers, and digital artists.

The artists featured in this Designer's Notebook show how they use Photoshop, Stitcher, PanaVue ImageAssembler, and other specialized tools to create high-quality panoramas and wide-angle images from a series of photos. They also show how to create virtual reality scenes with Apple's QuickTime VR in conjunction with leading-edge technologies that support 360-degree one-shot photos, cubic images, and 3D views of objects. The results are interactive, often startling, and bear the hallmark of each artist's original vision and skill.

Reflecting the very best of French photography, graphic design and digital artistry, "Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook" offers advanced Photoshop instruction that goes beyond opening this menu, or clicking thatpalette. You receive expert aesthetic guidance, from start to finish, with notes and views that reveal every step of the process. This book is a goldmine for any digital artist who wants to learn new Photoshop techniques and exploit them for maximum effect.

At home on either your coffee table or desktop, the book itself is dazzling in concept and design. There's nothing else quite like this Designer's Notebook available in the U.S.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"I found it to be a fascinating insight into a specialized topic and well worth reading" - Peter Dodsworth, Ping, Dec/Jan

About the Author

William Rodarmor is an award-winning French literary translator and a former editor at PC World magazine. For the O'Reilly Designer Notebook series he translated Assembling Panoramic Photos, Creating Photomontages with Photoshop, and Illustrations with Photoshop. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media (May 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596009755
• ISBN-13: 978-0596009755
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 8.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,012,771 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great stuff for intermediate/advanced photographers..., June 26, 2005

By 

Thomas Duff "Duffbert" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook (Paperback)

Digital cameras and powerful software tools have made panoramic photography much easier than it's been in the past. If you want to see real state-of-the-art panoramic work, you'll like Assembling Panoramic Photos - A Designer's Notebook published by O'Reilly.

Contents: Studio 01 - Waterfalls of Ice - Bertrand Bodin; Studio 02 - At the Restaurant - Arnaud Frich; Studio 03 - Frenzy at Almanarre Beach - Albert Lemoine; Studio 04 - The Workshop - Christophe Noel; Studio 05 - Urban Sphere - Sacha Popovic; Studio 06 - On the Boulevards - Peet Simard; Studio 07 - The Phare des Baleines Lighthouse - Laurent Thion; Studio 08 - Venice - The Orseolo Basin - Gilles Vidal

This book was translated from French by William Rodarmor, and all of the photographers hail from France. The general format of the book takes a particular panoramic photo from the person who created the picture, and then goes into detail about how it was done. This goes everywhere from the thoughts behind the composition, the equipment used to take the raw material, the software used to retouch and stitch the different pictures, and how certain difficulties had to be overcome. There are a number of different types of panoramas, going from traditional wide-angle content to a circular composition wrapped around a point on a sidewalk. This book will serve as both a source of inspiration and a catalog of techniques.

You'll get the most out of this book if you are intermediate to advanced in both digital photography and Photoshop. A number of stitching programs are used in the images, so you'll learn why some people prefer one over the other. If you're just Joe Schmoe with a digital camera and a stitching program, you'll probably be a little lost here. These photographers are professionals, and the results they produce are professional. They understand the tools of their trade very well, and it's that knowledge that allows them to get these types of results. So don't feel bad if the book is a little beyond you when you first start reading. But if you're willing to work at it and try out some of the techniques shown here, you'll soon be showing off some interesting results.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Short on details, November 15, 2005

By 

Colin E. Manning "Colin M" (Co. Cork, Ireland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook (Paperback)

A picture may well be worth a thousand words, but 8 pictures doesn't add up to a a book. This book takes the reader through 8 photographs by 8 different photographers who outline the techniques they used to generate them. Although some of the pictures are impressive, this book is a bit short on detail. If you are looking to get started with Panoramic pictures, you'd best start with some other books.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I found this book to be a great book on artistically making PANORMIC Photos, and More..., October 5, 2007

By 

Bruce B. Razban (Silicon Valley, California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook (Paperback)

I found this book to be a great book on artistically making PANORMIC Photos, and More...

It is an excellent book in showing different techniques as well as the art of "Assembling" Panoramic pictures. But it is also a work of art in helping you get an idea of the artistic and somewhat abstract way of doing this.

I followed the techniques, for example taking multiple shot of the same subject and then assembling that together, as another example I used the planning that is pointed out in this book, and multiple shots from the same view to make it super high resolution.

I used PhtotoShop for the "Stitching" and I got the same outstanding results.

This is a Great book for photographers.

Bruce Razban
Silicon Valley, CA, USA