DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

This panorama of San Francisco was assembled from 14 photographs, taken from the shore of Treasure Island last weekend. I wanted to capture the entire skyline, from the Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate Bridge.

It was an overcast and somewhat gloomy day; the original pictures turned out dismally flat. I stitched them as-is, then corrected the resulting panorama.

The large number of input images made the assembly difficult. ArcServ’s PanoramaMaker 2000 could not cope with the task. A newer version (PanoramaMaker 3) fared better, but still crashed during output — just after saving the TIFF, fortunately, given that the assembly and tweaking took an hour. The TIFF measured 63 MB.

An aggressive curve correction in Lab mode restored color, removed much of the haze, and corrected the red cast that is annoyingly typical of my CoolPix 995. At this point, the image seems too blue and too dark, but not offensively so.

The biggest problem is that it’s much too wide to be of any use — nearly 9:1. If I were to print it three feet wide, it would be about as tall as a postcard. At a height suitable for mounting, it would span a wall (and cost a fortune).