Making of: step 2, the stitching of Paris
The first step after the shooting is to cope with RAW files. Let Arnaud Frich explain his method and goal :
The stitching itself remains a bit complicated with a project of this size. Even if using a motorized panoramic head helps a lot during the shooting, the stitching still doesn’t give perfect results because of certain points : first, robustness of the motorized panoramic head (we had a break after each row to manually correct the focus) and second, repeating patterns in some of the buildings.
Let me remind you of the shooting layout in the Paris image : 138 columns by 17 rows, that is 2346 images. The first stitching gave the following image :
We can notice a shift in the rows which comes from a shooting issue: we missed 3 images during the shooting at the edge of one row and the beginning of the next. It’s the kind of stuff you don’t notice when out in the field but when you come back to the office (BTW: it was really a nightmare figuring out which images were missing as they were not named after the actual shooting order. Luckily, the missing images were at the edges of the panorama so the consequences were really low. We cropped the zone on the left side of the panorama. Yes! We could have 2 more columns in the panorama because we used only 136 out of 138 shot columns => this would have been 27 Gigapixels. Anyway…).
After spending an entire day finding and renumbering the missing images, we were able to use this new well-numbered set of images with the Clauss plugin of Autopano Giga in combination with the shooting log file.
The first optimization of the project with all images was quite good but not perfect because of some bad links remaining in the editor. It’s easy to guess why: repeating patterns in an urban landscape are really common; for example, there is nothing more similar than two windows next to each other. This can lead to alignment issues in detected control points between neighboring images. That’s what we can see in the following screen shot which raises this issue :
This screen shot shows a standard detection without using the Clauss plugin of Autopano Giga. You can see a lot of red zones where all false links have been found. If you use a motorized head, the issue is not as big as this one. It will be really low but can still exist. Nevertheless, isn’t that screen shot beautiful ?
With practice, coping with these false links is quite quick. What takes much longer is coping with out-of-focus zones (for example with the top of the roof of St-Sulpice tower). No miracles here. You need to manually move around the images with the move mode in the editor. A full day of work was needed to do that because even if each operation was really easy to do, it took time for each move operation to happen on a panorama of that size. Regular saving of the project is highly advised.
Once we arrived at that step, we had a perfectly geometrical panorama. But we still need to cope with color correction. The lighting of the scene changed a lot during such a long shooting so we needed to be careful with that. BTW : yes, if you look accurately at the image, you can see that shadows moved in the picture. Not easy to guess, but it’s findable. So we put a lot of color anchors in the panorama :
With the help of multiple selection, it’s a fairly quick operation. Optimization was done right after so we have a nearly finished project, as illustrated below :
We still need to crop, but we’ve got the final size : 354159 x 75570 = 26,763,795,630 pixels. Wow. Not bad 
We can now proceed to the rendering.
Alexandre Jenny
March 12th, 2010 at 5:32 pm
Thanks for the explanation about the geometric registration process. It’s very interesting.
It’s a pity that you must to have register some links manually. You use a motor head.. so normally you can order the shot and remove geometric ambiguity… normally !
March 14th, 2010 at 12:15 am
Just noticed a turtle on a balcony. That is messed up. Very cool photo and it is amazing what you will find since there is so much detail. If I can find the turtle again is there a way I can send you the location in the photo?
March 14th, 2010 at 3:06 am
the turtle is here: http://www.paris-26-gigapixels.com/?x=-31.11522420732449&y=11.280798639303146&z=0.5
but there seems to be a number “6″ beside it. maybe it was photoshopped in for some contest of something?
March 14th, 2010 at 6:46 pm
The turtle is part of the easter eggs in the pictures (there are 10 of it). You can share position clicking on the ‘Share my position’ button in the ‘Make the buzz!’ part under the photo.
March 14th, 2010 at 9:05 pm
guys, I just can’t believe you didn’t ask one of your lady friends to do a little sunbating on one of those rooftops…
March 15th, 2010 at 1:48 pm
there is still black rectangle on the bottom left somewhere, so you could as well leave all the missing images black.
March 15th, 2010 at 10:48 pm
simply fabulous – I plan to spend some time here – in the photograph as well as the city – love Paris and love St Sulpice.
good job.
March 16th, 2010 at 9:19 pm
thank you for this amazing work! it’s so moving with the music, i really need to go back to pariiiiiiis!!!!
March 18th, 2010 at 5:30 pm
Wonderful, amazing, I really dont have words. As an amateur photographer who loves to photograph Paris, to see this work was very pleasent to me. Congratulations!
March 19th, 2010 at 6:13 pm
i could see where using 3 or 6 camera would really speed up the process, however, as you pan out for the closer imaging, the overlap and alignment would be a problem, but you still have the same problem with just one camera.
March 20th, 2010 at 1:24 am
Grandioso trabalho! Parabéns
March 20th, 2010 at 3:02 am
Phantastic! Paris has ever been the paradise of photographers. Wasn`t Daguerre that innovative at his time?
March 23rd, 2010 at 3:20 pm
Found a Marmot … but why can’t I find any of those pigeons that are so common in Paris?
http://www.paris-26-gigapixels.com/?x=-61.354178366114674&y=18.35308555137308&z=0.5
April 2nd, 2010 at 7:20 am
An incredible project and result !
Congratulations.
Please come to my city and do it. (Manhattan)
April 3rd, 2010 at 10:16 pm
Fantastic job. I love the idea of the Eggs hidden in the panorama.
Une grenouille!
http://www.paris-26-gigapixels.com/?x=-46.99194169432986&y=18.26843618693476&z=0.5
April 11th, 2010 at 2:33 pm
@kiwano
Quote > why can’t I find any of those pigeons that are so common in Paris?
Here is one….
http://www.paris-26-gigapixels.com/?x=-46.897771882765944&y=14.220524895919587&z=0.5
gr h@rry
April 26th, 2010 at 3:15 pm
What did you use as your workstation. Because I can’t imagine the memory and cpu power that was needed for such a job.
April 26th, 2010 at 6:40 pm
That is amazing. I’ve tried to do this with maximum of 8 images and that was difficult to get a good results.
I envy your skills and patience!
May 10th, 2010 at 3:03 pm
Simply want to say your article is stunning. The clarity in your post is simply striking and i can assume you are an expert on this subject. Well with your permission allow me to grab your rss feed to keep up to date with future post. Thanks a million and please keep up the effective work.
May 11th, 2010 at 8:00 am
itz really amazing to watch it, people will love to visit this place…paris is always been a paradise.
May 13th, 2010 at 8:05 am
Прекрасная работа. Снизу не увидишь той своеобразной красоты Парижа. Благодарю Вас за очень позновательное фото. Огромное СПАСИБО!!!