Panoramic shots poor resolution

WillfromScilly

I bought my new D3300 mainly due to the Panoramic facility. Unfortunately I am disappointed with the resolution of the pics. I have the camera set a fine quality and pictures taken not in in Panoramic are large. For instance if I take a picture taken in Landscape mode into PhotoShop they are 78megs, but if I take one of my Panoramics they open at only 14 megs and are not bi enough to print at any reasonable size. I wanted to print pictures on tiled murals, but these useless for my needs. I'm at a loss to know what I'm doing wrong. The panoramic setting are on normal not wide, but I am told I should still have better resolution file size than this?

Can anyone please help?

Will - Isles of Scilly - UK

bruto

I think there is some oddity if any image is being registered as 78 megs in Photoshop, to start with. A Raw image in 12 bit full size would normally only be in the low 20's, and a JPG less.

I don't have a D3300, so can't address the panoramic quality directly, but you must remember that whatever image is taken, its density will be limited, and in normal mode, it's only 4800 pixels wide. I believe in wide mode it goes up to 9600, but that's still not enormously wide.

If you want very dense panoramas, I believe you'll do better by stitching.

Microsoft has a free program called "ICE" that works only on JPG files, but does a pretty nice job of stitching, with no apparent limit to the number of images that can be combined, both horizontally and vertically. If you take a number of images at wide angle, overlapped by about 1/3, you can make a panorama of enormous size. The process is pretty simple. The advantage of this program is that it runs alone.

When you do a panorama without a dedicated panorama head, there will be some parallax error in the appearance of near items, but very little if any in the distance, so try to avoid foreground objects. Remember too that it's almost impossible to get a really rectilinear scan, so leave plenty of room at the top and bottom for cropping.

The advantage of stitching is that the resulting image is not shrunk to the size the sensor requires. If you stitch together images to make one that is ten times wider than a single image, it will be 60 thousand pixels wide.

I've done a number of these, including some in Antarctica that were very wide and very detailed. The wider you go with simple swinging of the camera, the more distortion you'll get in the foreground, so, for example, if you're standing on a dock, the dock will appear to be a horseshoe. But the further away the less distortion. Here is a shot made some time ago with an 85 mm. shifting lens on a D3200. It is five shots wide, with the center three done by shifting the lens left and right, and the outer two by shifting the mount on the tripod. The result was nearly rectilinear, and though the reduced JPG is not terribly sharp, the original was as sharp as an individual shot with that lens would be, which is very.

http://jmp.sh/v/3Wij085BDtrmW23RYE8d