07.14.08

Deep Zoom Photography

Posted in Deep Zoom, Silverlight at 1:16 pm by Cal

Silverlight 2 includes a nifty new feature called Deep Zoom which lets you post a very large photo on the Internet which then exhibits remarkably responsive zooming and panning capability.? Microsoft’s demonstration project is the Hard Rock Cafe memorabilia wall.? Given my ongoing interest in travel photography, Deep Zoom immediately caught my eye.? I watched the MIX08 video featuring Scott Stanfield and then recently attended his Bay.NET presentation in San Francisco in June.

I just happened to have a few panorama photos which I have taken over the years (but never really done much with).? So I dug out these photos and using PTGui, a stiching application recommened by Scott, I combined my photos into some large panorama images.? Then after some minor touching up in Photoshop, I used the Deep Zoom Composer to prepare these panoramas for use with Silverlight.? You can see the results at www.travelswithcal.com/deepzoom/

Orinduik Falls

The key to a successful DeepZoom photo is a large enough image that allows zooming in to some meaningful level.? If you just take a standard 8 - 10 megapixel photo,? a user won’t be able to zoom in for very far until the image begins to seriously degrade.? (In this respect, I strongly recommend putting an upper limit on the permissible zoom since it makes very little sense to allow a user to zoom in beyond the point where the image begins to completely deteriorate.)? ? Given that most stitching software recommends between a 33 and 50 percent overlap between the photos to be combined, I would estimate that in most cases a 3 or 4 photo composite would be the smallest possible image that would give you a satisfactory Deep Zoom result.? Obviously, the larger the original image, the more zooming that can be achieved.

A friend and I are planning to take some San Francisco photos on July 26 with a view to creating some Deep Zoom panoramas.? What we are hoping to determine is whether following the correct procedures for image preparation can lead to some stunning results.? Stay tuned.

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