PT Viewer & Topaz Adjust 4 Review

Quite a few of the shots I took on my holiday were panorama’s of the view. This involved shooting 3 to 4 images of a scene, panning left to right, and making sure that the scene overlapped in each image. The latter is important for a stitching program to match the images up and create the one overall panorama image.

Prior to trying out the PTviewer word press plugin, I was sizing the image for the web with the width set at 800 pixels and letting Photoshop CS5 constrain the height proportions. I decided that this did not adequately portray the panorama and so tried out the PTviewer plugin. It did take a few attempts to get this right, particularly as I am 1 of these people who need a step by step guide. The key items I input were image width & height, horizon level & horizon field of view.

For the horizon level, I found this in photoshop, after resizing for the web, by hovering the mouse over the height of the image I wanted to use as the horizon and then taking the Y value in the info view tool. I then multiplied this value by the pixel resolution value found in the image size pop up.

The horizon field of view must be noted at the time you stitch the panorama. I used Hugin stitcher. I have yet to find it in Photoshop.

I have used an image width of 2000 letting Photoshop constrain the height proportions. The panorama is of Loch Torridon with Beinn Alligin & Liathach in the background using my Zuiko Olympus OM 35-80mm F2.8 lens at F16 on Fuji Sensia 100 slide film. I also used a 1 stop Cokin ND grad filter.

This is the image prior to using the PTViewer code.

and this is with PTViewer, which allows you to pan left to right etc when holding down the left mouse button.

[ptviewer
href="https://www.petes-photoworld.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/20110627001_Image_CP-20110627005_Image_CP.jpg"
imagewidth="2000" imageheight="352"
horizon="260" hfov="138" ]
Original Loch Torridon panorama
[/ptviewer]

You may agree that this image is a bit flat, and that is because the weather wasn’t particulary great that day. This also gave me a chance to try out Topaz Adjust 4 on a free trial, with the results being very good. There are several default settings that you can use, with slide bars to allow you to tailor the end result. For the purpose of this demonstration I used the vibrance default setting.

PTViewer display

[ptviewer
href="https://www.petes-photoworld.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/20110627001_Image_CP-20110627005_Image_CP_adjustpan.jpg"
imagewidth="2000" imageheight="352"
horizon="260" hfov="138" ]
Adjusted Loch Torridon panorama
[/ptviewer]