One of the interesting side effects from traveling around the city from soccer game to soccer game is that you are frequently given the chance to see the city from different perspectives. One of my son's games this season was on the artificial turf field on top of the SAIT parkade, which itself was new to me (I haven't been to SAIT in many years). There is a walkway north of the field that overlooks the parkade entrance. This walkway was also a great vantage point to downtown, which was where this photo was taken.
Downtown via SAIT IMG_1197
One of the things I had always meant to try was putting together some of those neat panorama photos that you often see. You know, the ones where you stand in one place and take multiple, overlapping photos of a scene around you. Then you stitch them together in your favourite photo editing software and make one gigantic photo out of each individual photo.
Over time, I had taken a lot of photos with the intention of stitching them together, but I never got around to actually assembling the images until recently. I'll have to dig through my photo archives to see what else I've taken that can be assembled, but here are a few of the recent ones I've done… (click through to view them on Flickr)
Sunset from Cranston
Downtown Calgary
I was downtown recently attending my sister's wedding reception. At the end of the night, as we were heading back to the car, I glanced upwards and saw some cool fog/clouds surrounding The Bow. Naturally, I took the camera out and took a few shots.
Now, with these being night shots, I wasn't terribly happy with the results, as there was a LOT of noise when I went to look at post-processing them. Then I recalled a friend of mine had recommended Bibble Pro 5, as it had a basic version of Noise Ninja integrated with it. Intrigued, I downloaded it, gave it a quick test, and here is the result:
The Bow at Night IMG_1362a
Of course, you can't really tell how the noise reduction performed when the photo is reduced to a web-friendly size, so here's a before and after comparison of a small section (100% crop) of the photo:
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| Before Processing |
After Noise Ninja |
I'm quite impressed with how well it reduced the noise in the photo. With some tweaking to Noise Ninja's settings, I'm sure it could have done even better. To that end, I'm now taking Bibble for a broader test drive to see how well it fits into my overall workflow.
