When I said that I shot some panoramas while in Alaska, I wasn’t kidding around. Today was the day to bust out the roll feeder and make prints. Here is one of the panos from a couple of miles north of Homer.
In it’s original form, this is a 4GB photoshop image, which takes my dual 2.0Ghz G5 30 minutes to save to disk. It is 1.5 feet by 9 feet at 240 dpi. It is stitched from 17 Canon 5D images.
For this print, I decided on 12″ by 90″ to fit within the confines of my humble Epson 2200. The Epson driver cannot accept single images over 44″ wide. So I had to dump out a flattened file, open it with Illustrator and tile the image onto essentially 5 13×19 pages which the epson driver prints without seams onto the roll paper. Lame, but better than spending $1k on a RIP that could do it natively.
Autopano Pro was used for the stitching. It can do some amazing things. No joke. You can literally hand hold shots in a circle and the SIFT algorithm will figure it out. Impressive technology.
It probably took close to an hour to print this bad boy out, but man is it impressive. I’ve got a couple more to work on, but this might be it for today. In all reality, this is just too large a pano to hang in anyone’s home. It would have to go to a business with a big hallway, but I might be able to find some customers like that….
What kind of price range are you looking at for something like that?
And how do you frame such a big bastard?
Looks good!
I’m not sure on pricing structure yet for a print this large, but matting and framing for it would be in the hundreds by itself. My friend Alain sells his matted 15×60 for $1900. Matting on this print would be something like 20×100.
I would guess that I would be in the $800 range for a matted version of this print. Framing would probably add $300. Framing would be a completely custom job. I actually don’t know if you can find single sheets of mat board over 60″ long, which is probably why Alain sells his at that length. It’s possible that I wouldn’t be able to mat it at all, might just have to dry mount it and frame from there.
Reasonably speaking, I should probably back this down to the 15×60 range just so people can actually hang it. In which case I would probably sell it for around $500 matted. It might be more or less, but those are ball-park numbers.
It should be noted here that it took a whole day to prepare this file for printing with only minor adjustments for tonality and sharpening. A “final” version of the file for sales would probably take me a few weeks of work to get ready. So there’s a good bit of work that goes into making a print this large.
When Adobe finally releases a universal version of Photoshop, and I sell a few of these prints to buy a Mac Pro, the process should be a lot faster.
That print looks amazing Joe. Justin and I both went “wow” and Justin almost never says wow, so that is saying a lot.