How to merge large scale mosaics with a high number of photos?

[JamesBond]

Good evening everyone, I am new to the site and I joined to ask a couple questions regarding some photoshop issues.

I have been trying to compile my mosaics for my graduate work, they were mostly taken with a tripod swinging left to right taking photos of rock faces (I am a geologist). The problem is that the rock faces are so large that the smallest mosaic was 293 photos. All the photos were taken with a Nikon D5000 with a panoramic lens, so the detail is good and the idea is to stitch them all together for a highly detailed mosaic of the rock face.

I have been trying to use photomerge but 293 photos is quite a lot of photos for it to handle and it has been crashing photoshop. I have tried to compensate for this by combining my pans from left to right individually and then trying to put the compiled layers of photos together, but I've run into issue with the fact that photomerge will flatten the image before it does it's thing, thus my merged lines get surrounded by a white border and are improperly merged.

I've tried to compensate for that by cropping the photomerged pans and then merging all the cropped pans together but that is not ideal as all of the overlap is distorting parts of the photo much more than just merging the photos together only the one time.

I've been a casual user of Photoshop since my days in high school and I'm running out of ideas. I figured I would reach out to some gurus and hope a better solution exists for my problem.

Ideally I would like to be able to save my lines as .gif files and combine the .gifs with photomerge but my files are quite large and thus saved as .ptb files and there is no option to convert to .gif. Also I don't know if photomerge even works with .gif files..

Well any advice and help is greatly appreciated, it would go a long way towards helping me complete my graduate thesis.

Cheers.

 

[Gaussian]

Wow that is a lot of photos to stitch together. I'm curious to know how you are taking the photos if you don't mind sharing, it sounds like an interesting project.

I don't have a lot of experience with stitching photos, and I have not used Photomerge, but I'll try to help.

Does the end result need to look seamless, or is it just important to get all the photos stitched together and have them be accurate? The process might be different depending on if you are going for aesthetics or accuracy.

I know there are several Photoshop plugins and also some stand-alone programs that do this quite well, Photomerge being one that seems to get mentioned a lot.

I have heard very good things about Hugin - Panorama photo stitcher... might be worth checking out.

 

[JamesBond]

Wow that is a lot of photos to stitch together. I'm curious to know how you are taking the photos if you don't mind sharing, it sounds like an interesting project.

I don't have a lot of experience with stitching photos, and I have not used Photomerge, but I'll try to help.

Does the end result need to look seamless, or is it just important to get all the photos stitched together and have them be accurate? The process might be different depending on if you are going for aesthetics or accuracy.

I know there are several Photoshop plugins and also some stand-alone programs that do this quite well, Photomerge being one that seems to get mentioned a lot.

I have heard very good things about Hugin photostitcher... might be worth checking out.

For the photos I tried to keep the tripod level while moving from left to right, starting at the top of the river cut rockface and then working my way down, trying as much as possible to keep overlap good enough for stitching purposes, both from a horizontal and vertical sense. I thought the lens was panoramic but it might actually be a telephoto lens, they were given to me so I'll have to look into that if it matters.

The idea is to be able to have one large mosaic from which the detail will allow me to interpret depositional features of the rock beds, so accuracy would be most important when stitching them together.

I am not too familiar with photoshop plugins so really if anyone has any advice I'll gladly take a look at anything mentioned. I will give Hugin a try.

Cheers.