Panorama Calculator — Frames, Overlap & Resolution

Most stitching software recommends 25-35% overlap between frames. 30% is the standard recommendation. Less overlap risks gaps or stitching errors, especially with plain subjects like sky or water. More overlap gives better results but requires more frames.

Portrait (vertical) orientation is preferred for panoramas. It captures more vertical coverage (important for foreground and sky), produces higher resolution, and makes stitching easier because each frame covers less horizontal angle. The extra frames are worth the improved result.

For landscapes, 35-50mm produces natural-looking panoramas with minimal distortion. Wider lenses (24mm) cover more per frame but introduce barrel distortion that complicates stitching. Longer lenses (85-200mm) create very high-resolution panoramas but require many more frames. A separate technique, the "Brenizer method" (or bokeh-panorama, named after photographer Ryan Brenizer), stitches many frames from a fast 85mm-or-longer prime — typically at f/1.4-f/2 — to create a portrait with an ultra-shallow depth of field and a wide field of view. It is a subject-isolation technique for portraits, not a landscape panorama method.

Rotate the camera around the lens nodal point (entrance pupil), not the tripod mount. Use a panoramic head with a sliding plate to position the nodal point over the rotation axis. For distant subjects, parallax is negligible and a regular tripod head works fine.