Simple mosaic for beginners.

[Ewan]

Hi SGL members.

I understand that some people, myself included, have had no luck with Autostich getting a Mosaic together, so this is for us really. Veteran Mosaic producers may find the EXTRA NOTE at the bottom handy as well.

I must start by saying I am by no means an expert but I do know what works for me through trial & error, this is a quick way to produce a mosaic but more actions in PS can be taken to further improve the image.

Now a lot of imagers on here have their own way of doing things & from the images I have seen I have to say it does work for them, a lot of readers though are left wondering just how they do it.

Well this is to show a step by step (well almost) way to get your panes, however many, into a seamless mosaic you can be proud of.

If you can capture, use AS!2 to get a stacked image & PS (Photoshop) or other processing software with similar features you may like this.

I will assume you have the same setup as me for this but the steps will still be the same through out.

1) Once I have run my captures through AS!2 & have my 18 panes I use IMPPG to BATCH process them into a new folder called Processed, I then start PS & select Files - Scripts - Load Files Into Stack.

2) Now go to File - New & make the Width 3000, Height 3000 & Resolution 144 (or other it's up to you), Background Contents should be OTHER & the small SQUARE I make as BLACK, Click OK

3) Go back to your Loaded Stack of panes & make sure ALL are selected with the little EYE icon on the Left.

4) Go to Select - All then Select the top PANE so it turns Blue then press CTRL - C, select the image file you created called MOSAIC then press CTRL - V, this will paste it onto the new Black background in an appropriate position of the Sun.

5) Select your Loaded Stack of Panes again, deselect the top pane & the next pane is all ready selected, Press CTRL - C, select the image file you created called MOSAIC then press CTRL - V, then with this pane ACTIVE move this over the already pasted 1st Pane & try to Align the detail so it Overlaps the other pane, you may find the detail has changed because of the capture length or the sun may have been pretty active, Align as best you can.

6) Do step 5 until all Panes are pasted into placed & the edge of the sun lines up pretty well.

 

7) As you can see there are some join lines visible but PS can take care of that for you, don't worry. Your Panes are now LAYERS, if some of the Layers look a little darker than others just find a darker looking one ie my two top left layers were, click the layer so it is Highlighted BLUE, then goto Image - Adjustments - Levels, I use the far RIGHT slider & drag it LEFT a little until that single layer looks a better match to the majority of the others. Do this step for all affected LAYERS.

 

8) Once you are happy with how your positioned Layers now look, CLICK the FIRST Layer & scroll to the bottom then CLICK the last IMAGE LAYER, MAKE SURE YOU UNTICK THE BLACK BACKGROUND VERY IMPORTANT WE ONLY WANT YOUR IMAGES SELECTED, go to Edit - Auto Blend Layers, SELECT PANORAMA in the pop up box & make sure Seamless Tones & Colours is selected as well, Click OK.

PS will Blend all your panes into a nice mosaic for you to tinker further with.

The resulting image below shows I still need to adjust levels on some of the layers as there is too much variation.
 

You can then fiddle until your content with your image & save out as you please.

EXTRA NOTE

Here is an additional tip if you can already produce mosaic's in PS but want to speed things up by a huge margin.

If you have a mosaic from a previous session then you can use this to your advantage.

STEP 2.5) Once you have your NEW file called MOSAIC made load the previously made mosaic into this as a Layer then carry on from Step 3), use ONLY the LIMB panes first, simply aligning the Panes you are placing with the LIMB of the Mosaic underneath. IMPORTANT :- The image scale has to be the same for this to work.

[xtreemchaos]

great stitching imfo mate.thanks for sharing..charl..

[Ewan]

Thank you Charl.

Here is how they should turn out, still a bit more PS to do though.

Before:-

After :-

[xtreemchaos]

thay have turned out real cool,i think a lot of people are going to benefit from your imfo,nice one mate.

[Davey-T]

Good job Ewan, I've never got PShop to auto stich more than three or four images together I then have to give it a helping hand and point it in the right direction to eventually get a mosaic.

Dave

[Ewan]

thay have turned out real cool,i think a lot of people are going to benefit from your imfo,nice one mate.

Not too bad but still they need a tweak.

Good job Ewan, I've never got PShop to auto stich more than three or four images together I then have to give it a helping hand and point it in the right direction to eventually get a mosaic.

Dave

I couldn't remember which Dave it was , really sorry Dave or I would have pm'd you a while ago about this.

I had the same problem with PS, the one thing you can't do is match the panes detail for detail as the sun's surface is just too active, it really does boil down to a best guess but you would never tell anyway.

Once the panes are all stitched, make a Duplicate & work on that one, click on each Layer & watch for the detail change on the mosaic as you click it on & off, if the detail improves when you Click a layer off (eye icon) then make sure it is on, Select the Eraser Tool, set to something like 8 & go over the area you liked to 'bring it through'. This works great on Prom & spot detail btw.

With the Eraser tool as well you can go around the edges of the panes to 'help' it Blend a little easier.

I was a little sceptical about posting a 'semi-tutorial' as I don't think I am 'qualified' enough to give such advice but having been imaging a while I felt a basic understanding of some methods needed to be described as easy as possible.

Hope it helps some one some where.

[Davey-T]

It all helps Ewan, I've tried taking images with from 20 percent to 50 percent overlap, going round the edges with the eraser, cropping them to make the top and bottom of the frames align so PShop has a head start, adjusting levels to match and still ended up with a pigs ear, I think I've only had one come out OK. Then there's Micheal churning them out without breaking into a sweat. 

Dave

[Ewan]

It all helps Ewan, I've tried taking images with from 20 percent to 50 percent overlap, going round the edges with the eraser, cropping them to make the top and bottom of the frames align so PShop has a head start, adjusting levels to match and still ended up with a pigs ear, I think I've only had one come out OK. Then there's Micheal churning them out without breaking into a sweat. 

Dave

It could well help you out Dave, I don't do a massive overlap when capturing but better safe than sorry.

[ngwillym]

Ewan thanks for all this help.

[Notty]

That's a great tutorial, thanks for that. For me after loads of failed and frustrating attempts at mosaicing, shouting at auto stitch etc completely bemused as to why it couldn't match what to me looked like obviously overlapping matching images, I started to manually stitch the images together as you do above. It was only then I finally realised I had two main problems stopping the software making the matches. This may be unique to PST (or modded PST) users and sorry if it's obvious stuff everyone knows about but it was a revaluation for me!

1) PST hotspots ie the intense brightspot in/near the middle and dark fringes. Each pane had it, and when manually aligning them I could see it clear as day. The cure was flats. Very easy for solar I think (compared to nighttime) I just point at the middle of the sun, defocus a lot then take a capture with all other setting identical to the rest of the captures. Create the master flat in AS!2 then load it when stacking each pane and they all suddenly take on a constant tone, magic!

2) PST etalon tuning obliterating the details on the fringes of each pane, depending on your own etalon (I'm told they are all unique!) I didn't realise it was happening at first, but when tuned a certain way, a very big prominent feature as viewed in the middle of the screen, when panned towards the edges of a frame for the next pane capture, suddenly gets detuned such that it looks like just any another tiny wavy bit! The solution was to find a big feature, and tune such that if I pan it to all the extremes it still looks the same. This is sometimes at odds with the desire to tune out the gradients/hotspot in 1) above but don't worry the flats should sort it out. Sometimes I would have to mess about with the camera shutter/exposure settings to get a decent trade off between 1 and 2 above.

Cropping and pre sharpening before the photo merge is necessary as suggested.

Sorry if it's obvious but after nearly giving up last year, my last 3 mosaics went together like a dream!

[Pete Presland]

Interesting tutorial thanks for taking the time to share. 

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Nice tutorial.

[David Smith]

Great write up Ewan. I don't have PS but will see what, if any of this I can do in Gimp.

I have had more success with MS-ICE than Auto Stitch so far and usually make sure that I have sharpened all of the panes with ImPPG before I try to create the mosaic.

What I really need is a good clear spell to allow me to experiment more with the capture process and get some good data to actually play with! I also need to be more organised with the data on my laptop, it's a complete    ear at the moment