Hyperfocal Skies from Hyperfocal Design

By Jeff Mottle (jmottle@cgarchitect.com)

Jeff Mottle is the President and Founder of CGarchitect.com and is the North American Creative Director for Smoothe.

Is your collection of panoramic skies incomplete, or are the versions you have now not cutting it? Well, if you answered yes to either of these you will be excited to find out that there is a new kid in town. The guys at Hyperfocal design have just released a new collection entitled Hyperfocal skies. A collection of 54 sky and landscape bitmaps that include multiple times of day and weather conditions, 360 degree and hemispherical formats as well as several landscape shots.

The collection comes on a single CD and is divided into several categories on the disc. The categories and images can be browsed with a simple HTML interface and are divided into: Hemispherical Skies, 360 Degree Skies and Landscape. There are 20 Hemispherical skies that are all 4000 pixels high by 12,000 to nearly 14,000 pixels wide.

There are 28 360 degree skies included in this collection that range in size from 2200 to 3000 pixels high to 12,200 to 15,600 pixels wide.

About the images

All of the images were shot with a Canon Powershot G2 and are all in a JPEG format. The image stitching was done in Photoshop and custom software was programmed by Block Software out of Australia to deal with the creation of the very large resolution Hemispherical skies. The image quality is very nice and the stitching is nearly flawless. There were a few things that could potentially cause problems, all of which are related to the fact that the images were shot digitally. The first is the subtle noise that is introduced into the photographs as a result of long exposures and digital compression at the camera. Although it is not noticeable until you view these images at 100%, I doubt it will be a problem for most people unless you are dealing with extremely high resolution images that focus largely on the sky. The last issue was with chromatic aberrations that was evident in a few of the images, in particular the landscape shots. Again an issue related to digitally shot images and the optics, you will notice a slight purple fringing around areas of high contrast.

Visible noise artifacting with long exposures


Slightly visible noise due to camera image compression

Conclusion

On a whole I found the collection quite impressive and from what I have seen, you will currently not find any other collections of this resolution around. If you compare the number of images you receive, the quality, the variety and price, you will find this collection pretty hard to beat. At $179.95 it is priced near the top end of the scale for sky collections, but is well worth the price when you consider the quality and variety included on this disc.

Hyperfocal skies can be purchased directly from Hyperfocal Design at: http://www.hyperfocaldesign.com