articles/Photoshop/stitchtime-page1

A Stitch in Time Saves Nine (thousand pounds!) - Paul McMullin extends his chip - part 1 of 1 2

Published 01/03/2003

By Paul McMullin

These two pages illustrate a trick that has been around for some years. Doubling the size of a camera chip is very costly. The manufacturing process is such that doubling the chip area is likely to cause much more than a doubling of the manufacturing failure rate - figures of tenfold have been talked about. In addition, a camera with a double size of chip would need to be physically much larger and the lens designs would have to incorporate a larger field coverage. The trick that has evolved is to use a shift lens and make images at either end of the shift range. Thus a Nikon 24mm shift lens, with an 11mm shift capability, can image 11mm either side of the optical axis, to create an additional 22mm of 'film plane' size and a near doubling of the total pixel count. Everything has to be shot in manual mode from a sturdy tripod, and the technique is of little use for moving subjects such as people or clouds in a landscape.

Providing the camera back is truly vertical there will be no converging verticals to deal with and a very simple stitch of the two images may be made in Photoshop or with a dedicated stitching program such as Autodesk Stitcher Unlimited 2009.

• A Stitch in Time Saves Nine (thousand pounds!) - Paul McMullin extends his chip page 1
  
• A Stitch in Time Saves Nine (thousand pounds!) - Paul McMullin extends his chip page 2
  

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