It's a panorama made up of 7 individual shots. I used a Sony Nex-5 with the kit lens, and stitched the pictures together using a freeware tool called Hugin. Also some contrast and saturation tweaking in Lightroom.
Source: original content, shot by me on 2016-09-27 with a handheld DSLR, images aligned/perspective corrected etc using Hugin, then made into a video using Avisynth and x264.
(The original sequence was 8 frames going from full depression to (almost) full elevation; I took the liberty of tacking on a copy of the sequence in reverse to the end.)
Since you ask: I did the remapping in Hugin by cropping the picture to the extents of the bubble and importing it as a full-frame fisheye picture, then remapping it to rectilinear. Quick and dirty color correction was done in the Gimp with the Levels tool, more specifically by clicking around with the middle eyedrop tool on areas that ought to be grey till I got a semblance of lifelike color. All in all five minutes work just for the hell of it.
I used to do these for anime for posting online, years ago. You dump the video to a series of stills, then using a panorama program like Hugin you create a pano from them. As long as the subject does not move (much) it's pretty automatic. I've done a few live action ones, but it is not often successful as it requires no movement other than the camera track.
Awesomely done!
Instead of using Photoshop, try using Hugin--it's specifically made for stitching panoramas, and can automatically correct exposures and stuff. There's a bit of a learning curve, but it's so worth it.
Couldn't just take a regular panorama with my phone -- the observation deck was filled with people and the corners got in the way.
I ended up taking individual photos and stitching them with an awesome open source tool called Hugin. (I didn't align the photos too well so I had to define a lot of control points by hand.)
I'm an amateur with this stuff, but I think it turned out pretty well! I feel super lucky to have been up there before the closure.
I've used the T5, 80D, and 6D on Linux. There's no need to use Canon's software. For raw processing there's Darktable and RawTherapee and for stitching panoramas there is Hugin.
Tried to take it with the longphone but there wasn't nearly enough light, so I ran back home and grabbed my Nikon D90. I stitched this together from nine very hastily shot photos, using a tool called hugin.
Aside of doing it by eyeballing in a graphics editor (like the GIMP), there's Hugin, which is supposed to have an exposure blender somewhere, but since I've only used it as a panorama stitcher, I don't know much about that sort of fine points.
Probably better: LuminanceHDR. I usually get adequate results with this with tripod, though it probably works best with 3 or more photos (one nominally exposed photo and both overexposed and underexposed photos).
I took about 50 screenshots from every angle around me and stitched the photos together using a panorama stitcher program. The program allows me to set a desired viewpoint and projection and renders it in high resolution.
The program is called Hugin.
First I pressed F1 to hide the user interface; then I rotated the view while pressing F2 to take screenshots; then I loaded the PNG files into hugin which is free and open source!
I agree with you that there's a huge gap in the mobile world for this type of panorama stitcher, especially as the built-in cameras become ever higher resolution.
I've started using Hugin (http://hugin.sourceforge.net) on the desktop to manually stitch together photos from my standalone camera, but I know that's not for everyone.
Another way that might be quicker then manually aligning the layers and masking people out in GIMP is to use Hugin. It's mainly designed for stitching panoramas but it'll auto-align and exposure match a load of images and let you easily mask stuff out (Tutorial here).
I use microsoft's Image Composite Editor. It ain't perfect, but it works well enough.
I've been told hugin is better, but I honestly can't be assed to learn how to use it properly.
More Panoramas:
Technical Notes:
Using Hugin, the same software to stitch the earlier posted panorama of Luneta Park, I discovered that there's no technical reason the source has to be from real life. I quickly started recording in-game videos and feeding snapshots into Hugin.
Lessons learned to get the highest quality "virtual" panoramas:
adb shell setprop debug.oculus.textureWidth 1536 adb shell setprop debug.oculus.textureHeight 1536 adb shell setprop debug.oculus.foveation.level 0 adb shell setprop debug.oculus.capture.width 1536 adb shell setprop debug.oculus.capture.height 1536 adb shell setprop debug.oculus.capture.bitrate 20000000
You have 3 days. Get this. This is your Lightroom replacement. It won't do everything but it will do a enough.
Get Nik Collection. With DxO buying it over, it may have some more longevity yet. This will be for local alterations. Again, it won't be as powerful as LR/PS, but for starters it doesn't need to be. I used Color Efex Pro mostly, but I've moved on to other paid software now.
For Stitching, get Hugin. It will stitch panos, and will do HDRs. Astro might be a mixed bag though, I haven't tried it with such.
Gimp is not bad, but has a high learning curve and sometimes feel like loosely coupled modules working non-really-seamlessly. But it is usable, just with less conveniences.
This was my journey =) Today I am using DxO PhotoLab (paid newest version of the first link) for bulk exports and presets. Affinity Photo as my LR/PS alternative which I am still learning.
Honestly this is not something you should be using GIMP for. The toolchain just isn't there. What you need is a panoramic-stitching program which will find and adjust control points automatically.
Hugin is free/opensource and should be able to handle this use case with a little tweaking. It'll output something a lot more consistent and usable, which you can then tweak with GIMP if there's still obvious issues.
> A little bit of everything ranging from image, web, dslr editing, and 3d stuff.
If you're doing photography, might I interest you in Hugin? It's a fantastic tool which can stitch multiple photos together in a giant panorama by aligning them using control points, adjusting geometry as necessary.
I should also add that ImageMagick is a suite of robust, versatile tools that can help you automate any image-related task.
Then there is Scribus, a nice desktop publishing application.
And since you must already be familiar with GIMP, Blender, Inkscape and suchlike, I probably won't be able to offer any more suggestions in your department.
Hugin is an excellent piece of software, and it's free. It's capable of completely and automatically assembling your panorama from a set of input images. It also handles 360 degree panoramas well. They have a tutorial on their website that's worth reading through, but the new versions actually don't require any of the manual work mentioned in it. You just have to click a button to add your images, another to assemble the images, and finally another to render.
As for taking the photos, usually just putting it on a tripod and spinning around will work fine for landscapes and for most rooms. Add plenty of overlap, and be very careful of people or moving objects.
I can't speak for other software, but Hugin allows you to choose the projection as part of the stitching process. Depending on how you take the photos, the choice of projection (and finer settings) will allow you to make straight horizons etc. http://hugin.sourceforge.net/docs/manual/Projections.html
waiting! I am waiting for a draft of my initial PhD proposal to come back so I can edit it and officially enrol, and waiting for feedback on very early draft of a journal article so I can steam ahead with that. So while I wait I am trying to stitch some of my field photos together to make a panorama. The app (Hugin) is quite nifty but the photos themselves aren't the greatest so results are kinda mixed so far.
Congrats on the new job! :D
You can take a bunch of pictures and generate a panorama using Hugin. Check this out for additional software and steps: http://forum.quest3d.com/index.php?topic=46542.0
Good luck, brochacho!
Took this panorama myself. Used Hugin to stitch it together. I also took another panorama picture looking towards Diamondhead.
Thanks! I used Hugin for photo stitching and Shadowplay for taking screenshots.
I disabled the HUD, lowered the FOV to 55, and had to mask out the gun in each shot. One way around the masking part is to put your back to a wall and sit down, but not all the pretty views have walls behind them.
I'd recommend checking out a tutorial on photo stitching, the results can be really cool! Another good photo stitching application is Microsoft ICE.
It sounds like you don't have a big ass scanner. Fixing the artifacts from a scanner is harder than fixing the distortion in photographs. So!
Lay the map out, light it evenly, and take a bunch of straight-on pictures at the same distance. Then, use one of these plugins with GIMP to stitch the images together:
There's also a standalone program called Hugin. Mileage may vary.
For anyone else with the same issue and access to Photoshop, it's simply File > Automate > Photomerge...
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It's actually not too hard to make these yourself! This is the result of 60 screenshots from my PS4 stitched together using Hugin.
Once you have enough screenshots to cover a sphere, you can stitch it into a "Stereographic" projection so that it looks like a little planet. There are several tutorials for this online like this one although they deal with IRL photos and not videogames.
The hard part is that you have to be quick when taking the screenshots because the lighting in Fallout 4 changes every minute or so. This makes tall trees, clouds, and hanging wires a huge pain to align. I'm in the process of building a PC so that hopefully I won't have these issues in the future, and to see what these would look like with 4k screenshots.
I have done the method, with varying success.
Regarding Hugin, you might need to not use some photos, and you will most likely need to crop and/or mask out parts of images. Consider marking your own points if the software gets confused.
The best shots of my varying success: Two pano shots
And for gods sake, make a few normal shots in case all other plans fail.
Hugin is a panoramic stitcher available for free and for nearly all operating systems.
Basic workflow is you
There are a lot of other options, you can, for example, optimise the lens-parameters (or use known ones: ptlens-database) too to remove pincushion/barrel distortion. For real panoramas there also comes the projection-types into play, not interesting for you. Some nice manuals can be found on the Hugin-page.
Back to other software: Adobe Photoshop also offers stacking of pictures (File -> Scripts -> Load Files into Stack). I don't really know how good it is, as I often end up stacking/stitching panoramas with Hugin because of the fine tuning options.
there are a few steps. figure out relative alignment of the images; upscale and move them to the appropriate location in the space of the final image; merge the overlapping pieces into a single final image.
step one is complicated, but can be skipped if you know exactly how you moved the camera. step two is fairly simple. step three is also complicated.
Came out real neat, I also used to use VirtualDub with the Deshaker filter for time-lapse creation its pretty slick software but nowhere near as trick as Hugin, you should check it out its free and opensource.
http://hugin.sourceforge.net
This is stunningly beautiful!
About stitching the larger image: did you try a panorama software like hugin?
http://hugin.sourceforge.net/download/
I have used it only for photos so far that had overlapping parts.
For displaying, I found a Photoshop plugin that exports a large image in smaller tiles of different zoom levels that can then be used with an open source map viewer. I use that on my website to show panoramas. I'd be happy to help with that later today if you don't have Photoshop at hand.
Another piece of output from the recent /r/anime rewatch.
This stitch is based on shots from episode 11. It was created with Hugin and fixed up with GIMP.
Bonus: Failed attempt
Hardware:
Intel Core i7-6700T
32GB RAM
128GB SSD
4TB External HDD
Dell P2415Q 4K Monitor
Logitech Mechanical Keyboard
Kensington Orbit Trackball Mouse
Kingston USB 3.0 Card Reader
Software:
Fedora Design Suite: Operating System
Darktable: Raw Processing
Hugin: Stitching Panoramas
This will sound weird, and be awkward, but I believe it's possible to do this with Hugin and Blender. Hugin can match features with manual selection and calculate the lens parameters of your cameras. Blender has similar feature matching where it can reconstruct 3D positions in its motion tracking. In principle I think either could do it, but I'm a little fuzzy on how to get the 3D intersection results out of Hugin.
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/editors/movie_clip_editor/tracking/introduction.html http://hugin.sourceforge.net/
Hugin does panoramas and can handle just about anything. Rotation between individual frames isn't an issue if you set things correctly. It's not particularly user-friendly, but there are plenty of tutorials on how to use it and it's free.
You might want to look into using Hugin for daylight stuff. I'd also be curious how your nighttime source material stacked in it, because what I use it for my own daytime panos, or night time stuff, the stacking never seems to do what I want it to do (but I have less shots on hand).
I'm a novice too, so I'm not sure what the more professional photographers use, but I use this. It works best if you have a panorama guide setting on your camera, but it will do a damn good job, regardless.
I since bought a smartphone that does it all for you: guides your picture alignment then stitches them automatically. Obviously it's smartphone camera quality, though, and much more limited in scope. It feels like a cop-out. :/
First Question: yes, you can edit existing spheres in Photoshop and then upload them as long as the metadata remains intact. If you want to stitch together images to make up a photosphere you could do that in Photoshop manually, but it's a ton of work and much less fluid as, for example, PTGui. If you don't want to spend money on it, Microsoft ICE and Hugin are free and do the same job just about as well.
Second one: Work with a fisheye lens, start at the least interesting point, make sure you lock exposure and aperture (I generally shoot in Aperture mode, letting the camera decide on shutter speed, locking exposure to the light midpoint of the sphere). You can create 360x180 in Photomerge but be aware that they're much less likely to be accepted into Maps if you submit them. With a good fisheye you have a full sphere with six shots, keep the legs on your tripod tucked as much as possible and make sure to rotate around your nodal point, not your tripod mount.
If you're using your DSLR you'll need to add the necessary metadata. This can either be done via Google's web tool or by downloading or creating a photosphere via your phone, using exiftool to extract the metadata, adapting it, and writing it into the new file.
Hope this helps to get you started.
The distortion you see isn't related to the lens as much as your stitching technique. Does your software allow a choice of projections? "Rectilinear" or "planar" projection will keep everything straight. I am most familiar with Hugin, which gives really fine control over every part of the stitching process (and is therefore fairly complex). But its automatic settings often do very well too. I think Microsoft ICE is another good choice.
It's very easy actually. You need to create a series of photos for a panorama. Load the pictures into Hugin, stitch them and then play around with the projections. You can actually rotate the view once stitched and look for a cool view.
For a pic like OP's you need a halfway covered sky. You can also take multiple exposures of the scene, to get the "HDR" effect, which gives you those beautiful contrasts and colors (if done right).
Edit: Now that I think about it, OP might have mapped the sky separately and photoshopd the two parts together. The clouds are upside down on the upper right.
hugin is an open-source panorama photostitch program that allows for the fast and easy creation of large-format panoramas. Don't have enough good things to say about that software suite
This is my secret. Make sure you have lots of overlap between shots and keep the sensor perpendicular to the ground to avoid parallax.
Also if your pictures are blurry it means your shutter speed is too low.
Use a dedicated panorama merging tool for the best results, they provide heaps of tools to tweak the alignment of your images. For example, PTGui is really excellent for this: http://www.ptgui.com/ , it has special control points you can add to ensure that vertical lines stay vertical in the final merge. Even with its fully automated stitching, I've never seen errors like this.
Hugin is a free opensource panorama merging tool which is based on the same backend as PTGui (that's Panorama Tools). I haven't tried it out but I've heard good things about it, http://hugin.sourceforge.net/.
I can try merging your source images in PTGui for you if you post them somewhere to see how well it does.
Ahh, I found it so difficult to find a picture of a car that would work that I didn't realise that it was backwards! PT GUI is a Panorama Tools stitching program; hugin is an open source alternative, it takes the individual shots and stitches them together, but it usually leaves you with a lot of gaps to fill in photoshop.
Camera: Canon 350D
Lens: Canon 17-40mm F4 L
Total number of pictures : 7 or 8
Tool used to stitch the pictures: Hugin - absolutely wonderful open source tool
Location: Near Potash, driving from Canyonlands to Moab, Utah.
(Edit: Added location)
Thanks, I hope so, architectural photography is a bit of an art of its own. I ended up not being able to quite get the photo straight on, so I used Hugin to get the perspective right.
Which Photomerge layout option did you use to make the panorama? In theory, either the "collage" or "reposition" option should do what you want.
> Since I am moving as I'm taking these pictures, there should be minimal distortion/warping.
Your focal length and subject distance might introduce some warping in the individual images, though.
> it adds a bit of a fisheye distortion.
In theory, the Filter / Adaptive Wide Angle should correct for this ... but frankly I've never gotten it to work.
Alternatively, Hugin might be a better choice for this? Not sure, though.
Maybe you can follow this tutorial on Hugin site.
http://hugin.sourceforge.net/tutorials/scans/en.shtml
Once i have used Hugin to join cca 50 pieces of map to join into one image.
Actually, photographing it might be your best bet. The main problem is that without a copystand, it's going to be hard to get the camera exactly perpendicular with the photo lying flat, so there may be some keystoning. So, perspective correction in post may also be called for, as well as cleanup of scratches/dust/colors, etc.
The google camera app can do this too, on Android. You just take the pictures where it says, and you wind up with an equirectangular image, or whatever it's called in Blender.
The f/1.4 probably caused vignetting (where the corners/edges of the frame are darker than the center). It tends to be less evident at smaller aperture settings. You can fix the vignetting on the individual member images before stitching, or use a stitching algorithm that uses enblend to minimize the effects.
I'd recommend stitching with something other than Lightroom/Photoshop's Photomerge tool. Hugin is open source and ICE is free.
Are you using Hugin? I know they have an auto-detect for cylindrical projection but I've only ever used it for DSLR panoramas not for screenshots. Wonder if it would work.
Edit: Hugin cylindrical projection link Not sure if this is helpful.
I've been using Hugin for this purpose for years.
It's not exactly the most user-friendly software out there, but it's hella powerful and thus it's got all the controls necessary to ensure that something which originated as flat scan is stitched with the proper perspective. As you said, most are geared towards making panoramas from stills, and that usually entails a different set of perspective correction techniques.
Hugin's got a guide on stitching multiple sections of scans.
Yes, this is probably your best bet. Check out http://hugin.sourceforge.net/ for stitching. Definatly search around for linear polarizors, you will need large ones for the light sources and a good (tiffen) one for your lens
Probably worth computer control to automate it, so you could just put the camera on the rig, press a button and a while later you have the finished file.
Heres a guide how to remove objects that don't move from infront of a background by stitching photos taken from different angles. Using free, open source panorama stitching software, Hugin:
Heres a guide how to remove objects that don't move from infront of a background by stitching photos taken from different angles. Using free, open source panorama stitching software, Hugin:
http://hugin.sourceforge.net/tutorials/Mosaic-mode/en.shtml
edit: added descriptive words
In addition to what the others are recommending, look into panorama or "stitching" software. Hugin is free, quite capable, and fairly easy to use (drop photos in, follow the steps around, tweak if you want to).
Panoramic software lets you stitch together photos taken side by side that overlap slightly, to create a much larger field of view. They make it easy to deal with things like aligning the photos, adjusting their brightness to match each other, and dealing with lens curvature.
Panoramic photos make for excellent showcases on a website, allowing clients to have a 360° look with infinite scroll.
> and Photoshop
Hugin does a great job of these distortion type changes. Can adjust in multiple directions to the correct outcome rather than just skewing by hand.
http://hugin.sourceforge.net/tutorials/architectural/
http://hugin.sourceforge.net/tutorials/surveying/en.shtml
The individual photos were taken on a Nikon D7500 DSLR with a 20.9 MP DX (APS-C) sensor, using a Tamron SP 70-200mm F/2.8 Di VC USD G2 telephoto lens. With the 1.5x crop of the DX sensor, the lens has an effective focal length of 105–300mm.
The first panorama was shot at 70 mm, and the second at 200 mm. The individual RAW photos were processed for colour, white balance and contrast in Adobe Lightroom Classic CC, stitched together with the FOSS software, Hugin, and watermarked with the FOSS software, GIMP 2.10.
The full-size stitched panoramas in TIFF format can be found here. Warning, these pictures are huge—the latter image is about 700 MB, in 16-bit colour, and is a cool 105.63 megapixels.
Hugin is Free Software and works well, but can be a bit painful in the beginning. Instead of producing an HDR image (.exr), I usually just let emblend/enfuse blend my bracketed shots together and then edit the resulting tiff a little more.
We have Litchi though, ~~and that's Android exclusive~~. It has a ton of sweet features, one of which is fully automated photo taking for panoramas.
You still have to stitch and upload the photos yourself, but there are tons of free tools for that.
Hugin is multi-platform, and Image Composite Editor (ICE) is a decent windows-only option.
Free tools include Microsoft ICE ( https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/product/computational-photography-applications/image-composite-editor/ ), Windows only, and Hugin ( http://hugin.sourceforge.net/ ). ICE is easier to use, but Hugin can give slightly better results (I use Hugin). Lightroom can also do it, but isn't free.
The tool isn't a problem. The real challenge is composing the shot and capturing the images.
Hugin is a very powerful opensource tool for panorama stitching and bracketing and stack and so on.
It is not friendly, but it is useful, and its stitching features can even allow to merge hand-held exposures and do more fancy stuff. But if you only need bracketing and are using a well-stabilized tripod, maybe it will overcomplicate the workflow.
I can't imagine a method that will let you get a panorama and still have good stars, as there will be movement between exposures. Honestly, you sound like a candidate for the 8/1.8 fisheye, which you can rent when you need it, and perhaps some de-fishing software. 16MP is plenty for a nice sized print; the rule of 300dpi in the source file for a quality print is pessimistic and naive. I have a 16x20 print that was made from a 12MP file, and it looks great even up close.
If you want to do stitched panoramas of star fields, get yourself a tracking mount, such as the one from iOptron. You won't use the built-in panorama function, instead you use Photoshop (or Hugin, if you're cheap :-), and stitch in post.
I'm not 100% sure I follow what you're asking, but I think you're looking to create an equirectangular image to texture the inside of a sphere?
If that's the case you can use Hugin to generate the equirectangular image.
I blame the panoramic software I used to line up the images. Since I was a dumbass and didn't bring a tripod for my camera, I had to shoot from the hip (figuratively speaking) which meant the camera wobbled around a lot and I got slightly different angles in different shots etc, so the tank didn't like up nicely between frames. So I used Hugin to automatically line the photos up properly and fix the perspective mismatches between frames, but it's not perfect. It achieved the goal of making the tank stay at the same place in the frame so the animation works, but yes it also made the background rather wobbly.
So since I actually can't use the Action Director software on any computer in my house. (yay windows 10!) I did the next best thing, assume you already went through the trouble of stitching the images before noticing they are warped and you want to fix them after the fact.
my tutorial uses Hugin which is free and open-source so it's not like getting it is going to set you back. (Also I'm going to make a tutorial on how to get better panoramas by manually stitching. The images really come out nice using Hugin/ptGui. (ptGui is like Hugin but you have to pay for it.)
I've tried the inbuilt panorama option a few times but none of them turned out how I wanted them to be.
And most importantly, they're not saved as RAW so you can't edit them.
So instead just make a panorama yourself and use stitching software to put them all together.
Personally I use Kolor Autopana but you'll have to pay for it so Hugin might be easier since it's free.
Quick release is nice. Usually find them on full size with smoother action for panning. I have a lightweight Sunpak that goes about six feet up fully extended and has quick release with bubble levels built in, but it's still too heavy for my liking if I were to tour with it.
It is quite affordable to mount a camera to your handlebars. Take stable shots with it, then patch multiple shots together using Hugin.
Thanks! This is a stereographic projection of 66 screenshots taken on PS4 and stitched together using Hugin. There are a few tutorials online like this one on how to create these using actual photos.
One thing you might want to look into is photo stitching - this way you can increase the resolution of an image without having to increase the resolution of the camera. If you get a setup where you can simply move the camera on a rail, you could conceivably have a cheaper camera while still retaining the large resolution you are looking for. Look at http://hugin.sourceforge.net/ for an example. One thing that might prevent that from being successful is whether the black glass face is not very different (i.e. not a lot of common points between the images to make stitching them together easy)
However, I am not a pro photographer so I'll let someone else chime in too, there might be a better solution :)
How are you doing this in Photoshop? Just rotate/scale and Polar Coordinates?
There's not much more you can do in Photoshop I think...
I think you should instead have a look at Hugin.
I didn't test it, but it will give you tons of options and should let your freely move it around and change how it will distort (e.g. putting the ground in the centre). It might be a good idea to look up a tutorial or two to get started. :)
I think it does. I don't do any HDR stuff because the results I'd get with my puny little Elph, even with the custom firmware that enables HDR in the first place, wouldn't really be worth it. But if your HDRis are packaged as TIFFS then I'm pretty sure Hugin can work with them, as there are HDR options in the program. See here and here.
My process is somewhat similar to the one /u/CupricWolf described, although I use different tools for the job. Nowadays a lot of smart phones have a mode on their camera app that will do 360-degree spherical panos (The projection method that warps everything into a planetoid shape is actually called stereographic), but I did most of mine several years ago before those were prevalent.
Camera: Stupid little Canon PowerShot SD1200IS (Digital Elph). I don't own an SLR camera.
Camera firmware: Custom CHDK firmware, which unlocks SLR-style capabilities on point-and-shoot Canons. Allows me to set manual exposure settings for better-matching photos.
Image-stitching software: Hugin. Free, open-source, cross-platform panorama stitcher. It's incredibly powerful and doesn't have that bad of a learning curve. Basically it'll try and align an arbitrary number of photos for you using common "control points" it identifies between images, then you go in an correct errors, and add new important control points it missed. Repeat those two steps until you've got something that looks good, and then it blends everything together with a really nice composting engine. You've gotta play around with it for a few days to get competent with it, but totally worth it.
You can use Hugin http://hugin.sourceforge.net/ Make sure you take enough screenshots and leave about 30% overlap between each image. Hugin should work really well with ingame screenshots. Don't forget to turn off the HUD
They're geometric distortions caused by wide angle lenses, varying levels of zoom, and probably selective cropping. Different parts of the image are bing stretched or compressed. Unless the lens is super wide angle (like, approaching fisheye type lenses), it can be hard to judge exactly how distorted the landscape is without a comparative image from a narrower lens.
If you don't have any such lenses but would like to experiment with this concept, try a panoramic stitching program (eg. I've been using Hugin for years) with a few images from your camera phone. You can play around with the fun different ways to (de-)project wide field images.
First, I recommend you use manual settings when shooting panoramas so that all the images have the same settings to begin with.
If you were using Photomerge in Photoshop, make sure you check the "Blend Images Together" checkbox.
This would be hell to manually fix on a flat image, so at this point if Photoshop still completely fails on this image, try some other panorama software (like Hugin).
Here is Hugin for anyone looking...
That e-book is $50... if that's too much for others (as it is for me), there's a free tuts for this online, like this one for Hugin, and many more for photoshop etc...
I forgot about this: Microsoft Image Composite Editor. It's free. I used it on another machine for a number of panoramas, but none interactive QVR or spherical-mapped.
Here's another: Hugin -- open source, free. Here's a nice tutorial for Hugin using AutoPano Tools, another free software.
Not sure on the images, but I'll have a look around.
My preferred tool is the cross-platform, free, open source panorama stitcher Hugin.
Take a bunch of pictures, making sure to keep the camera in the same location and only rotate around the nodal point in the lens. You need ones going 360° around and down to the nadir below you, but you don't need to go part way up toward the zenith in the sky, as the zenith above you is stretched out to infinity. Throw in the images into Hugin, let it generate control points, and have it align the images (let it adjust the FOV as well if it's a 360° panorama). If you need to, add more control points by hand, or mask out sections, then re-align the images.
When you're ready, change the projection from equirectangular to stereoscopic and adjust the pitch by 90° so you're looking down, and you'll have a little world with none of the pinching at the center. It can be hard to get the nadir that's now the center of the panorama to stitch quite right, so it helps if you're standing on some amorphously textured surface like grass, rather than a strongly patterned surface (like a checkerboard or a bench) that will show any misalignments.
My favorite Gasworks little world is a nighttime one made from dozens of long exposures.
Here's an album of some other little worlds I've made from 360° panoramas using Hugin.
If you can't use any tripod (and don't do macro - the change in perspective makes everything difficult) you can use Hugin (freeware) or even Photoshop to re-overlap the pictures. Not so difficult :)
Oops, figuring out how to use this freeware panorama software Hugin. This was made from ~35 ingame screenshots (and fully automated) so I was fairly impressed. Regret posting it now :(
If you're running Windows, you can try Microsoft ICE. It does a pretty good job. You can save in a bunch of different formats - JPG, TIFF, PSD (in layers).
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ice/
It came from Microsoft's research department, which builds some pretty awesome stuff.
If you're running OS X or ICE doesn't do a very good job, I'd try Hugin.
It probably could, you could try using hugin, which is an open source tool primarily used for making panoramas but also can be used to correct for distortion/perspective. This tutorial might be of use. If you have any desire to try creating panorama's I highly suggest you try it with hugin ,it's surprisingly easy and you can get some really impressive results. Also if you have Photoshop or Lightroom there are ways of correcting distortion in there and if you want something a little more straightforward here's a tutorial for doing it with GIMP.
I checked some of the images that were used to make the final pano, which I used Hugin to blend and stitch together, and most of their settings were F/4 and between 1/500 and 1/300 shutter speed, no exposure correction. I wanted to have F/2.5 but those turned out much more overexposed so I had to make do with what worked. I used a cheap point-and-shoot that I have had for years, the Canon powershot A610.
I use a program called Hugin to stitch together panoramic photos of landscapes. It can probably stitch together screenshots easily.
Edit: Like this one
Alternatively, try hugin... it does a great job at lining things up AND getting the levels just right so everything is quite smooth.
Added benefit: it's cross platform and open source!
I love doing these, and yours is quite the view. One question: did you take your images to overlap? Some panorama stitching software might be able to make those shots fit more tightly, and match the tone and contrast to make it mostly seamless.
I haven't done one for myself in about a year, so I'm not sure what the best software is, but check out this one, it's open source, and I find it produces great results:
edit: grammer