Easy way to precisely line up images with slight nodal pan misalignment

Question

I have the following two images, with a stick in the peak of a golf ball in one, and in the trough in another:

They are very similar, however they are slightly misaligned due to nodal pans in between photos. We can safely assume that the size/position of the golf ball, focal length, Y/Z position, Y/Z tilt and zoom of the camera have all remained the same. All that has changed is that the camera may have moved ever so slightly forward or backwards, and panned at most 10deg from left to right, and that the stick has also possibly tilted on the X axis. Is there any way, using Photoshop, Lightroom and/or GIMP/Hugin to line up these images? As fairly evident by the subject of the photos, I am trying to measure the depth of the pit, but I first need to line up the images before I can make the calculations. I have been able to line them up after an hour of painstaking manual warping, but I am looking for an easier method that works automatically. I have found some tools (like Hugin on CMD) that work fairly well, but the rotation of the stick seems to throw it off. Are there any better tools/methods for doing this (I have 20+ sets of images that I can't spend a whole week lining up)?

Thanks.

Answer 1

There is no way to line up the particular images you took/posted. But there is absolutely a way to setup your camera & tripod to so that you can take perfectly aligned images for panoramas.

What you are experiencing is known as parallax, and the technique involves finding the no-parallax point of the lens. At a minimum, you need a camera mount that can rotate, and a means to arbitrarily position a camera forward or aft on top of the rotation mount. A tripod with a pan feature, or ballhead with a pan axis, is enough for the mount. For the fore-aft slide, ideally you'd use a clamp mechanism, with the camera mounted on a rail that can be positioned forward/aft in the clamp.

The setup will look like this:

^{Setup for a single-row panorama shot. From ReallyRightStuff.com}

A note on terminology:

The location of the no-parallax point is the center of the entrance pupil of the lens. Often the NPP is referred as the "nodal point", or in your case, there's a "nodal misalignment". This is not strictly correct; the nodal point(s) of a lens are not the same as the entrance pupil. Nevertheless, the misnomer terms persist (especially with the "Nodal Ninja" brand of panorama tools on the market.

The technique for finding the no-parallax point has been well-documented here, and at places on the web.

• Inkista's answer to How are virtual tour photos taken?
• Do I "need" a panoramic head to shoot 360 panoramas?
• The diagram in ElindallTheTall's answer to How do I shoot a panorama with a Nikon D5200? helps demonstrate the problem you are experiencing.

Great descriptions the technique(s) for finding the NPP:

• Finding the No-Parallax Point (johnpanos.com)
• Finding the No-Parallax Point at ReallyRightStuff.com, which makes and sells high-quality (and very expensive) photographic mounts.
• The Nodal Point (hugha.co.uk)
• The Proper Pivot Point for Panoramic Photography (dougkerr.net)

Here's a handy cheatsheet for adjustments to make when finding the no-parallax point:

^{No Parallax Point: NPP Determination Procedure, by Henrik Fessler. CC BY-NC-SA 3.0}