Friday, March 19, 2010

Paris 26 Gigapixels

Paris 26 Gigapixels is a stitching of 2346 single photos showing a very high-resolution panoramic view of the French capital (354,159x75,570 px).

9 comments:

turnip4thebooks said...

I'nt photography brilliant? Apart from a few pedestrians in a street (underwhelming excitement level) the only people I saw were having a meeting under a green and white striped awning. No cats? No entwined lovers? No men lathered and ready for shaving? Are you sure this is Paris? It always surprises me (I have done a similar project from the chimney of our single story house in the burbs) that whereas there is a perception that urban areas are crowded with people, the densities vary widely, and are often much lower than might be guessed. I once stood outside Foyle's bookshop in London--on the stroke of 9am the street emptied briefly, albeit only for a couple of minutes, and a photograph taken at that moment would have seemed absurd if titled 'Central London on a Working Day'. Thanks for the heads up as they say in America (and down, and sideways!)

Jan said...

Awesome! Especially with the music from Amélie, one of my favorite movies.

Tonstant Weader said...

They say 'awesome' in America, too. Actually, they say very little else.

Alex said...

As for people, the steps up to Sacre Cour are crowded.

I too am wondering when people will start spotting nudes in windows of this picture.

kittlieginny said...

Oh, were you looking for nudes too, Alex?

I never saw the crowd on the steps of Basilique du Sacré-Cœur (forgive the French, but translated into English as the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Paris it sounds like a joke, even though French folklore claims that after the resurrection Mary Magdalene and Jesus met up in France) but that was probably because I was checking out the windows on all those apartments.

On second thought, Alex, if you were checking the churches, you probably were not looking for nudes.

Ray said...

.... and lest we forget, Thanks to Eolake for posting this link.

Tommy said...

You know, this offers me the opportunity to ask about stitching. Recently I took two series of shots. One had 15 .DNG files which Photoshop was able to stitch together, quite nicely. The other is a series of 42 .DNG files. Photoshop can not stitch this series. It appears like it's a resource (memory?) issue. I have 4GB of memory. Each image is about 23.5MB.

I'm using Photoshop CS3 and even tried CS4 (I read that CS4 had been improved in this area).

I've also tried stitching 4 or 6 at once and then trying to stitch the results, but no luck after a point.

Does anyone have any idea why I can't do this.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

There apps likt Sticher, but they are not cheap.

panopipes said...

Not to be evasively unhelpful, but stitching is a big subject. A short answer, on Macintosh at least, may be DoubleTake at $24.95:

http://tr.im/SMsX

Expensive apps (such as Autodesk Stitcher) usually offer complexities and advanced algorithms that are not needed for everyday use. There are free programs too, and some camera manufacturers include stitching utilities in their dedicated software.

Tommy's Photoshop problems are difficult to diagnose without more information,. I am wondering about how the scratch disk is set up in Preferences, how much disk space is available (consumed at an alarming rate, and I like to have available a minimum of three times the space occupied by the original files) and if the method Tommy used even employed the scratch disk or required all RAM). Maybe a tutorial will be helpful:

http://tr.im/SMrr

http://tr.im/SMsB

http://tr.im/SMuj

The Photomerge command was greatly improved in CS3 and tweaked in CS4 (including the new collage option) but if you go that route CS3 should suffice:

http://tr.im/SMwn