If your tripod ever shows in any of your pictures, it will most likely show in your final panorama. There are several ways of dealing with this problem; here are the three most popular ones:
1- Don’t let the tripod show in any of your source images. Make your lowest row of pictures low enough so that it covers as much viewable area as possible without ever seeing any part of the tripod. After you are done taking your set of images, hold your camera in place as you take your tripod away, and snap a picture of the ground directly below it where the tripod was. This is the image you will use to cap the bottom of your panorama. It is generally more forgiving about nodal accuracy.
2- If your shooting setup includes a down / nadir shot (-90 vertical degrees), shoot several photos looking down but at different rotations, for example, every 120 degrees. Then, hold your camera in place as you take your tripod away, and snap a picture of the ground directly below. This way you will have 3 overlapping images of the ground and the tripod, plus one handheld ground shot. Load these source images in your image editing program before you load them into Stitcher. Overlap the 3 images with the tripod on top of each other, and eliminate the bits where you can see the tripod and the panoramic head’s arm. If you do the cleanup correctly, you should have a clean image with a circular hole at the bottom. Fill this hole with the handheld image’s contents. Save this image and use it as your ‘down” shot in Stitcher, it will produce perfectly clean results.
3- Shoot the same number of pictures as option B, but do load them all into Stitcher. Stitch all the images, and make sure you use the Stencil tool to stencil out all parts belonging to the tripod and panoramic head attachment. If necessary, force-stitch the handheld shot to the bottom of your panorama and render. You should get clean results directly from Stitcher.
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