Fontaine Saint-Michel

I’ve been going over my back catalogue of unstitched panoramas. These are mostly one which I didn’t have time to assemble at the time, or were lesser priority than other ones. However, this one was challenging to stitch due to the combination of lots of moving objects and the need to take a bracketed exposure for the sky, and I have waited nearly three years before attempting it. My post-process has improved and the tools I use have also advanced which means that I can now more easily assemble difficult panoramas.

The panorama was taken on a visit to Paris in July 2009. It was a lovely summer’s day, sunny but not too hot. The sunset was not going to be too spectacular so I decided to wander around to soak up the ambiance. The Fontaine Saint-Michel is a noted meeting spot for young and old. It had a lively atmosphere so I hung around and set up my tripod. The people near me didn’t seem to have a problem with it so I quickly took a series of shots, especially trying to capture the moving people and allow me latitude during assembly.

I knew at the time that it would be tricky to blend together the shots without cutting people in half. I had many other panoramas to stitch from the trip and I concentrated on the low lying fruit. Waiting three years to attempt this has paid dividends. The masking tools in Hugin and the RAW development in Lightroom 4 have improved immensely. With lots of masking, I was able to assemble a near seamless panorama, and the highlight recovery tool was able to bring down the highlights which helped blend bracketed exposures. Enfuse was then used to exposure fuse three renderings of the scene to adaptively compress the dynamic range into something which looks naturalistic.

I was able to assemble all the elements within Hugin itself without the need to use Photoshop to blend layers, clone or mask elements after stitching. I did my usual post-processing in Picture Windows Pro 6, levels, curves, large-radius sharpening, detail sharpening, and a few colour tweaks.