VR Panoramas > Stitching Techniques

As Murphy's law states, "What can go wrong.... goes wrong". So here are a few ideas of what you may encounter:

1. The panorama is too much of a "letter-box" shape - You should take the pictures in "portrait" mode, with the longest side vertical. This will give you a pano with more look-up-and-down ability ("vertical pan"). If you have a zoom lens, zoom out as far as possible!
   
   
2. The panorama looks deformed/everything is warped! This is most likely the result of an improper alignment of your camera: the horizon wasn't in the middle of your images. To solve this, you can cut off parts of the images to get things right (most stitching applications allow you to "crop"), or even apply some perspective corrections if you're able to. In the worst case you'll need to start over from the very beginning (sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings...)!
   
   
3. The images have incompatible dimensions - a) make sure the images are all rotated the same way(!) and (b) make sure they're all the same size!
   
   
4. Disaster! The program crashed and I lost all my work - this is not an uncommon phenomenon (especially if you're using VR Worx). All I can say is: SAVE early. SAVE again. And when you're done saving, SAVE some more! This is actually a generally good practise in terms improving MEMORY PERFORMANCE. That is, saving the project gives the stitching application a directory in which to store temporary copies of the computed images and thumbnails. If it's a well written program, this lets it remove the images from memory when they are not needed.
   
   
5. Washed-out images - Color problems like these occasionally result from the automatic exposure matching or the automatic exposure correction performed by stitching programs. For example, it may not be possible to exposure match a 360 degree panorama that includes images into deep shadow and into bright sun (maybe including the sun itself). Try diabling these options. Remember you can always retouch the finished, stitched panorama in Photoshop to add contrast, colour "burn", etc.