Customer Reviews

Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook

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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.

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.

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

This book is small but really comprehensive. Through specific examples people that knows the secret of panoramic photography, gives tips & tricks for a good panoramic photo using normal cameras and lenses.
In the beginning i read it very quick but then i discover more more than even in the smallest paragraph there is a nice tip.
The only "bad" is that most of the writers use realviz stitcher as main stitching program. Why this is "bad"? Because the program costs more than 400 euro. There is also a express release around 100 euro but with limited use.
But the tips and tricks are still there. I personally use PTGui with Pano2cube software and i can use most of this books advices. it is highly recommended for the photographer he wants to involved in panoramic photography.

Panoramic photos have always been a favorite of mine. I'm obviously not alone, as this book (as well as web sites devoted to panoramic photos and QuickTime VR) proves.

This book takes eight different scenes and describes the artist's methods and thought processes to creating the panorama. My favorite is the "Urban Sphere", which takes a set of photos an creates a sphere. This creates a photo with no notion of top or bottom. As you rotate the page around your brain focuses on what is "up" and the photo appears "new" every 45 degrees or so... Uber-cool.

The descriptions and instruction come from the artists perspective. While it does have a "how to" feel, in my opinion, the value is in the artistic ideas and the information about how to get the shots to make a compelling panorama.

If you've got a Canon camera, you probably have PhotoStitch on the CD that came with it - which is what got me originally hooked on panoramas. While pretty cool, this book will take you beyond simple panoramas to artistic, visually unique panoramas.

The latest in O'Reilly's series by French artists. As with the earlier books, this tries to speak to you at a level above mere craftsmanship. While the latter is desirable and indeed necessary before you grip this book, more intangible issues are discussed here.

Unsurprisingly, Photoshop is the most common package used by the artists. Other offerings are peripherally invoked, like Real Viz's Stitcher or PanaVue's Image Assembler. It's just that overall, nothing matches the comprehensive set of tools in Photoshop.

Making a panorama can be tricky. Aligning those photos well is not trivial, in order to have a seamless transition. So the methods here are quite handy to master. The book can make you wonder, though. What on earth did people do for panoramas, before Photoshop and computers?

If you're looking to start taking QTVR or the likes kind of photo, you're better off reading off the Internet and/or visiting forums to ask about taking the shot, finding the nodal point, stitching them together, publishing them on the web. This book takes 8 guys who takes 8 different pano then put them into a book. That's about it. You won't learn anything new in terms of technique/s. Like for the one on Almanarre Beach, instead of advising readers how to minimise doing the photoshopping away of waves and people which the book covers a lot, they should have advise users to take as little shots as possible. I guess this book is trying to cover on Photoshop techniques pertaining to pano photographers.

Few books on photograph go into much detail or depth on handling panorama format photos, which makes the advice of Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook important. Another feature which lends unique value: leading French photographers and artists present their techniques, translated by William Rodarmor for English readers, with step-by-step examples of technique beginning with initial shots and progressing to specific panoramic techniques. The end result is an essential reference which should be a part of any solid photography book collection.

Unlike the other books in this series this one is only for advanced photoshop users and artists. It's a beautiful walkthrough of some amazing projects. But if you want to get any real use out of it you are going to have to do some serious neuronal crunching to make use of the high-end techniques presented here. That being said, this is an amazing book that shows just what can be done in the panoramic digital photography.

I came to Moab Utah to take photos of the great national parks and the state park (Dead Horse SP). After two weeks I bought the Really Right Stuff equipment for making horizontal and vertical panoramas. The photoshop CS2 books and the internet suggested that joining them would be easy to do. Hoever, this great book, shows that much more skill is needed in taking the photographs and using the software. The book gives an outline of the steps needed to compose the 8 digital panoramas but does not give exact details because considerable experiment is needed. In the first chapter where 3 images are joined to form an ice fall in an ice cave the photographer took 200 images. In the panoramic beach scene the waves were coninuously moving during the shooting so that an incredible amount of editing was needed to form a great image. This book shows what can be done if skill is used at every step Now I realise how much incredible work Max Lyons had to do to compose his terabyte image of Bryce Canyon. "The Photoshop CS2book for Digital Photographers" has a small chapter on panorams.
For some reason "Assembling Panoramic Photos" is well hidden in the Amazon search terms.
Howard McPherson, Cleveland, Ohio (Moab, Utah)