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10/24/2005 10:38:38 PM · #26 |
I've had pretty good luck with the Hugin front end for the panotools. It's a little tricky to figure out the interface at first, and you have to install 3 pieces of software. But, once you get the hang of adjusting the perspective distortions, you'll find it does an amazing job, even for hand held auto exposures.
The photo below was hand-held, and I think auto-exposure of 9 images.
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10/24/2005 10:53:28 PM · #27 |
| I got something called Panorama Maker with my Nikon... It works well enough, and when it doesn't, I can manually set stitch points |
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10/24/2005 11:07:49 PM · #28 |
From my personal experince:
Put everything in manual. Shutter, aperature, white balance, even focus. Use as much telephoto as you can, it reduces distortion. Watch out for vignetting on some lenses. Tripod and bubble levels are recomennded, and so is a grid focusing screen.
But I have done a quick'n dirty panoramas handheld:
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10/27/2005 05:24:29 PM · #29 |
| Just came across a link to another interesting-sounding program -- Autostich -- developed at UBC. Supports stitching in both horizontal and vertical axes -- you can theoretically create a 360x180 degree (hemispherical) view. Looks like the demo version is free. |
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10/27/2005 06:05:11 PM · #30 |
Originally posted by GeneralE:
Just came across a link to another interesting-sounding program -- Autostich -- developed at UBC. Supports stitching in both horizontal and vertical axes -- you can theoretically create a 360x180 degree (hemispherical) view. Looks like the demo version is free. |
AutoStitch is the result of work by Prof. David Lowe, who's a very well known name in the computer vision industry. There's quite a bit of interest in unconstrained image registration in this community, but I've personally never been convinced it has much to do with the interests of photographers. In particular, a photographer is almost always going to order the images in a panorama from one end to the other. Programs like AutoStitch are famous because they don't require that sort of assumptions. Solving that challange is an impressive scientific accomplishment, but doesn't seem like an important feature to photographers.
BTW, seeing how PanoTools got recommended by many of you, I went back and gave it another try, this time with the Hugin interface. It's still a bit of a pain to use, but I have to admit the results looked better than any of the other tools I've tried. |
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10/27/2005 06:22:35 PM · #31 |
Thanks for the background on Autostitch. If the photos are in order, wouldn't it just do the job more quickly and efficiently?
I'm interested because it seems to do a decent job automatically and is free -- I have a few sets of stitchable photos to play with, but have never tried any of the tools, so this seemed like an interesting place to start.
The ZIP file is only 1MB! |
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10/27/2005 06:22:46 PM · #32 |
Originally posted by magnus:
AutoStitch is the result of work by Prof. David Lowe, who's a very well known name in the computer vision industry. There's quite a bit of interest in unconstrained image registration in this community, but I've personally never been convinced it has much to do with the interests of photographers. In particular, a photographer is almost always going to order the images in a panorama from one end to the other. Programs like AutoStitch are famous because they don't require that sort of assumptions. Solving that challange is an impressive scientific accomplishment, but doesn't seem like an important feature to photographers.
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Sure it's important to photographers. If I stitch 4 pictures off a 8mp Digicam, I have 32mp to work with on a panorama, minus 30% for stitching (done right) and I have 21mp left over. Or, think of is this way. Take 10 vertical shots @100mm, and then another 10 above that to match, add that together you get 160mp, minus 30% on cropping, and you still have 105mp.
That figure seems pretty important to me. I could then sell the picture enlarged to like five feet by 2 feet with no qualms whatsoever about image quality. If I could find someone to print it that is. :o)
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10/27/2005 06:26:12 PM · #33 |
Originally posted by wavelength:
I could then sell the picture enlarged to like five feet by 2 feet with no qualms whatsoever about image quality. If I could find someone to print it that is. :o) |
I think I could print that at work, though the printer is used for pre-press proofs and not for photographs, so I couldn't guarantee the color fidelity ... : ( |
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10/27/2005 06:32:48 PM · #34 |
Originally posted by wavelength:
Sure it's important to photographers. If I stitch 4 pictures off a 8mp Digicam, I have 32mp to work with on a panorama, minus 30% for stitching (done right) and I have 21mp left over. Or, think of is this way. Take 10 vertical shots @100mm, and then another 10 above that to match, add that together you get 160mp, minus 30% on cropping, and you still have 105mp.
That figure seems pretty important to me. I could then sell the picture enlarged to like five feet by 2 feet with no qualms whatsoever about image quality. If I could find someone to print it that is. :o) |
Hold on now, I didn't say panoramas weren't important! I love taking panoramas. I was just trying to warn people that Autostitch (and few other such tools from academia) really aren't what photographers expect. But there are many other good panorama stitching tools out there.
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10/27/2005 06:44:21 PM · #35 |
Originally posted by magnus:
Originally posted by wavelength:
Sure it's important to photographers. If I stitch 4 pictures off a 8mp Digicam, I have 32mp to work with on a panorama, minus 30% for stitching (done right) and I have 21mp left over. Or, think of is this way. Take 10 vertical shots @100mm, and then another 10 above that to match, add that together you get 160mp, minus 30% on cropping, and you still have 105mp.
That figure seems pretty important to me. I could then sell the picture enlarged to like five feet by 2 feet with no qualms whatsoever about image quality. If I could find someone to print it that is. :o) |
Hold on now, I didn't say panoramas weren't important! I love taking panoramas. I was just trying to warn people that Autostitch (and few other such tools from academia) really aren't what photographers expect. But there are many other good panorama stitching tools out there. |
I was speaking directly of the ability to stack photos instead of just side by side like all others, weren't you?
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10/27/2005 06:58:39 PM · #36 |
Originally posted by wavelength:
Originally posted by magnus:
Originally posted by wavelength:
Sure it's important to photographers. If I stitch 4 pictures off a 8mp Digicam, I have 32mp to work with on a panorama, minus 30% for stitching (done right) and I have 21mp left over. Or, think of is this way. Take 10 vertical shots @100mm, and then another 10 above that to match, add that together you get 160mp, minus 30% on cropping, and you still have 105mp.
That figure seems pretty important to me. I could then sell the picture enlarged to like five feet by 2 feet with no qualms whatsoever about image quality. If I could find someone to print it that is. :o) |
Hold on now, I didn't say panoramas weren't important! I love taking panoramas. I was just trying to warn people that Autostitch (and few other such tools from academia) really aren't what photographers expect. But there are many other good panorama stitching tools out there. |
I was speaking directly of the ability to stack photos instead of just side by side like all others, weren't you? |
Lots of stitching software lets you arrange photos in both rows and colums, to produce huge mosaics. But AutoStitch's key "feature" is that will figure out how to stitch them even if you shot them in some bizarre random order. Like if you did a 4x4 mosaic, but shot the 3rd tile first, then the 15th, 10th, 1st, 7th,... I don't see too many photographers doing that. |
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10/27/2005 07:23:35 PM · #37 |
I haven't done any serious side-by-side testing of the various tools out there, but have played with a few. All the pano series I have taken are handheld, so that could have a major effect on the reliability of the tools.
Started with PhotoSticth that comes with Canon cameras/zoombrowser...not very reliable, but fairly quick. Seams are often crap.
Then I tried Autostitch. Seemed to work well, and quick enough. Even though I took only one row of shots side by side (not grid/mosaic), not a bad job. Still had some problems with the seams/registration, but not nearly as bad as PhotoStitch. Also, it can only use .jpg as the input files.
Just recently, I downloaded PTAssembler (Shareware, 30 day trial). It's a front-end for PanoTools. Along with support programs of AutoStitch and enblend, it does a really nice job. In the few that I have tested it on, I only really saw one spot it didn't do a very good job on. But, using enblend, it's really slow (with full sized images from my RebelXT). I plan to test smartblend which has a few other limitations (size, 8bit), but it's supposed to be reliable and quicker than enblend. Since it has pano tools as the back-end, it can accept jpg/tiff/?? as input files.
Haven't looked at hugin... The PTAssembler front end has lots of boxes and buttons that could easily be overwhelming, but the autostitch is just so darned easy. :-)
Edit:
I just wanted to follow-up on some more testing. I tried out smartblend tonight (still used with PTAssembler/Autopano). It is *much* faster than enblend (7 large jpg files took around an hour with enblend, but less than 10 minutes with smartblend), and the seams were better than with enblend. Enblend was good, barely noticeable at worst. But side-by-side comparison, where I detected seams on the enblend version, I couldn't with smartblend.
And in case anyone is interested, here are the links:
PTAssembler: //www.tawbaware.com/ptasmblr.htm ($39 registration)
links on that page for autopano and enblend (free)
Smartblend: //www.minorlogic.com/projects/smartblend/index.htm
Message edited by author 2005-10-27 23:32:32. |
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