Pan-tastic

Belhaven Sands this morning. I rode the beach bike along the shore and back through the dunes before work, what a great start to the day.

Big Beach and Bike.

I took the little camera which was fun to use. I decided to use its Panorama function, which worked fairly well. The problem I encountered was banding of the light as it combines a load of images it has taken, which must be taken at different exposures. That seems a bit daft - the exposure should be set from the first image and ideally that would be optional. However I liked the image so I worked to fix it.

Here's the original.

The banding is most obvious in the sky, so I tried blurring the sky at first but that didn't really do it.

Then I added a layer and used the gradient brush to draw a sky-coloured gradient with colours sampled from the image. I added a layer mask to only show the sky portion, again using the gradient tool. Then I adjusted the opacity of the blue image to a point where a compromise between the fake sky and the real-but-banded sky looked good. That looked OK.

Then I thought I'd try HDR to combine my new image with the original, just to see what that gave me. I went for "Photorealistic Low Contrast", which further reduced the banding and lightened the rest of the image.

Finally, the HDR had lightened the sky too much so I added the previous "sky fixed" version as a layer, added a layer mask fo sky-only and adjusted the layer's opacity to my taste.

The end result is OK, but it really shouldn't be necessary. This banding basically makes the Panorama feature of the TX30 unusable. I had my issues with the nikon P310, but it didn't create banding and I've read that Canon compacts set a single exposure too. Ah well, I'll be going back to Hugin for future panoramas from a series of images.