Perspective challenge
The two panoramas above are taken from exactly the same series of photographs of the Market Colonnade (Tržní kolonáda) in the Czech city of Carlsbad/Karlovy Vary. Both are multi-perspective panoramas, taken from three only slightly offset viewpoints. First, we created the upper image and thus applied our typical perspective visualisation. Unfortunately, the result was too distorted for our expectations. There is a simple reason for this. Compared to classical street front panoramas, the motif is clearly more three-dimensional. With the castle tower and the rising town houses in the back left, too much takes place in the background of the picture. If we were to shift the shooting perspectives strongly to the side, we would get duplications and areas in the background that are difficult to work with. The central wooden gable of the colonnade would also not work well. The result is that both the view to the right into Lazenska and the buildings to the left in the background and the people in this area are strongly distorted and do not produce a convincing visualisation of the square situation.
Combination of two visualisation options
So we thought about replacing the two side areas with spherical representations and leaving the central area with the colonnade and the castle tower in perspective. This worked quite well on the right with the view into Lazenska Street, but was very time-consuming in image processing, especially on the left. Here, manual work had to be done very precisely and along exact borders in the area of the stairs and the yellow town house (Hotel Romance). Since the perspective representation hides parts of the hotel façade that now had to become visible, manual reworking was necessary here and you can see the change in perspective in the hotel building very well. The result is a combination of spherical side views at the edges and a linearised central perspective for the central market colonnade (Tržní kolonáda). What do you think of both versions? Do you share our opinion that the second image version better represents the spatial feeling of the square?
Here you can find the complete view of the panorama (and more about the history) of the der Market Colonnade in Karlovy Vary:
