Rotating single or whole rows of rogue images?

[Robin Hood]

Hello PTGui support . . .

This old chestnut crops up now and again for me but I never know how to apply rotation to single images only, (let alone shift-click: whole row). I have 7 rogue images in one row that turned from portrait to landscape, it's really confusing the stitch (and me).

I see you can rotate a whole set of images. How would that be useful? Microsoft's (hidden) rotate tool in explorer (W10) seems to have a glitch with RAW images, so that's no good. I don't want to change settings in the camera because generally everything works well and I think it would add other problems.

A context sensitive 'right-click' option invoking four rotational arrows or P/L would be great. As far as I know, I looked in all menus / sub-menus, side options for rotate.

The curved left/right arrow icons om the menu tabs are a red Herring (undo/redo).

Apologies if it's me being stupid. I did look at your online solutions but nothing relevant for 'how to rotate single PTGui image). Otherwise, could an easy solution please be added to your ever-growing wish-list Joost? If it doesn't already exist, I think it would be very beneficial to PTGui (for the small coding required) . . .

Thanks in advance.

RH

[John Houghton]

RH, Where are you seeing the changes in image orientation? Is it on the Project Assistant screen or on the Panorama Editor window.?  The orientations on the Project Assistant screen simply reflect the approximate orientations of the images as they currently appear in the output panorama image.  Clicking the rotate buttons on the Project Assistant screen rotates the entire composite panorama image in the Panorama Editor window in increments of 90 degrees.  This affects the orientations of individual images on the Project Assistant screen in diverse ways, but these can be ignored.  You can rotate an individual image in the Panorama Editor window by clicking Mode->Edit individual images.  Then select an individual image from the row of thumbnails at the top and rotate in the main display below by dragging the with the right mouse button held down.

If you have individual images in unlikely orientations in the Panorama Editor window after running Align Images or the optimizer, this will be due to :

possibly bad control points, or

a complete absence of control points on some images (orphan images), or

groups of images may be internally linked by control points between images within the group, but there may not be links between the groups.

The Control Point Assistant (Tools menu) will help to identify such problems.

You may like to avoid having images in a mixture of orientations on input when using raw images by going to the Project Settings screen and unchecking the option in the Miscellaneous section to "Physically rotate images with EXIF orientation tag upon loading" before loading in your images.

Also, there is much information in the help screens, accessed by clicking Help-> Help for this screen.

John

[PTGui Support]

Hi RH,

I would need to understand the problem first in order to be able to help
you. Could you make your project available (preferably including the
source images)?

Kind regards,

Joost Nieuwenhuijse
www.ptgui.com

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[Robin Hood]

Thanks for your quick response John,
I knew about the edit individual images which I sometimes use for problem stitching, or if there are too few identifiers for finding control points.
I really thought I'd found the solution after your suggestion, when I saw as soon as you rotate with right click and hold, each image in the thumbnail assumes the correct orientation.
But it's not the solution for rotating to the correct orientation when you align images, they're still confused.

To sidetrack slightly, edit individual images is sometimes impossible to manipulate because you're never sure which image you're moving because the image number doesn't move while you're repositioning (you find you moved the wrong image).
The target number needs to stick like a magnet and move with it (the positioning of the mouse pointer also ensuring you zone in on the correct image. Currently it's uncontrollable, that's another issue though. While I'm on the 'other issue' tack, what exactly is the point of the two camera icons rotated advising you have 'orientation mix' when clicking either does nothing when rogue images are selected. Let's face it, if either of those rotation symbols worked it could be useful but I've never found out what they're for. Align images is loading the last row of 7 images as landscape and not following the 'Align to Grid' requirement or the portrait camera data, turning that on or off in PTGui has no effect. My images are practically straight up rotating on the vertical axis round 180° of the top of a building.

In most apps, right-click-rotate is a given, why not in an image manipulation app like PTGui? It's from 'align images' that correct orientation needs to be manually set to give the stitch a fighting chance - i.e. shift-click the last row and then hunt the  ← P → button. I'm sorry but shouldn't rotating an image 90° be a mouse-click away, not a search and rescue expedition trawling the internet for a solution. Can I therefore reiterate my original request for an easier method with an icon-driven or context-sensitive mouse rotate; or top menu icons like ← L →   ← P →  Maybe I'm oversimplifying things and I'm sorry if that's the case. It's just a bit strange for an image manipulation app not to have rotate right or left or landscape/portrait buttons readily at hand. I was always surprised L / P is not a right-click option from the edit window thumbnails. Sorry, it's late and I've probably laboured the point somewhat.

PTGui still delivers incomparable results (the majority of the time)! . . .

Many thanks for your support!
RH

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[John Houghton]

On Wednesday, November 16, 2022 at 1:21:45 AM UTC md20...@googlemail.com wrote:

 My images are practically straight up rotating on the vertical axis round 180° of the top of a building.

RH, You may be having odd orientation problems for images taken with the camera pointing vertically upwards.  The camera's orientation sensor then delivers random data since gravity is acting at right angles to the plane of the image sensor.  There's no "up" or "down"!  While PTGui can cope with mixed orientations, there can be issues with the application of global lens shift parameters, which are intended to compensate for the optical axis of the lens not being precisely aligned with the centre of the image centre.  Applying random shift corrections can make things worse rather than better.  These issues can be addressed by assigning individual lens shift parameters for the affected images on the Lens Settings tab.  Or, as was mentioned in my earlier response, uncheck the option to physically rotate the images with EXIF orientation tag on the Project Settings tab (perhaps the easiest and best option).

John

[Robin Hood]

Sorry John (and thanks again)! but EXIF camera orientation data 'On' or 'Off' made no difference.

Surprisingly, it seems in both hardware and software, only I know the correct orientation of my images, which is why forcing manual rotation in PTGui requires a rotation tool to give the stitching a headstart . . .

Parallax/PEP isn't the issue, everything is optimum and the bubble-level dead-centre. It's clear (as you alluded to) aiming up too-vertically / rotating 180° is problematic (and likely only a 1% user requirement(?)

What's required (and for the PTGui engine to understand) is the camera's gyro-positional-data and that's down Camera manufacturers firmware I guess.

The top of the building facade rotated noticably on each lower half image of the last row of seven PTGui usually identifies these differences.

I noticed yesterday that archived forum questions relating to rotate options remain unsolved.

Whiteout fog also compounded the problem on the other shots but as I said, align to grid usually solves that. (I don't make anything easy :-)

I know it's a testing scenario and anything you can come up with would be great, I certainly don't expect you to perform my problematic stitches, only to find a resolution to single rotate.

To simplify things from a layman's POV, wouldn't the missing 'rotate-tool-override' fix this in seven seconds? (or shift-click seven in two)?

I'll make all files available to Joost and yourself via wetransfer. BTW, Erik is aware of this issue from previous support.

Much appreciated!

RH

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[Erik Krause]

Am 16.11.22 um 10:19 schrieb Robin Hood:

> To simplify things from a layman's POV, wouldn't the missing
> 'rotate-tool-override' fix this in seven seconds? (or shift-click seven in
> two)?

No. PTGui relies entirely on control points. If your images don't align
in the resulting panorama there definitely are wrong or missing control
points. No rotation tool could solve this.

If your entire panorama isn't rotated correctly, you can either rotated
it manually in the panorama editor or use vertical and/or horizontal
control points. Understand the "vertical" and "horizontal" refers to the
output projection. Onlx in rectilinear projection all horizontals
(parallel to the sensor plane) are horizontal. In all other projections
only the horizon itself is horizontal, while all verticals are vertical
in rectilinear, cylindrical and equirectangular.

--
Erik Krause

[Robin Hood]

Understood Erik, thanks, but what chance does 'generate control points' have, when the entire last row is loading landscape instead of portrait?

Which is why you get the trippy, warped results with the seven images not knowing which is up/down/left/right.

Wouldn't rotating them (if the tool existed) give 'find control points' a fairer, level playing field (pardon the pun :-)

RH

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[John Houghton]

RH, If you have disabled the option to rotate the images with EXIF data, then all of the (raw) images should be in landscape orientation after loading.  One click of the rotate button will rotate all of the images into portrait orientation.

John

[PTGui Support]

I think the rotation is not any issue here. The control point generator
has no problem with differently rotated images. Just make sure the
'camera portrait orientation' button is set correctly in Lens Settings.

If you are bothered by the rotated images, go to Project Settings and
uncheck the 'Physically rotate images..' checkbox at the bottom. You
need to do this before loading the images. This will work for your raw
files, because they are not actually rotated but merely tagged with an
orientation.

Once you convert raw to tiff (in Photoshop for example), the raw
converter will generally physically rotate the images, so the above
trick no longer works. As I said PTGui doesn't mind.

Your panorama is a bit difficult due to the upper row images containing
only sky, and probably due to parallax in the upper row.

Kind regards,

Joost Nieuwenhuijse
www.ptgui.com

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[Robin Hood]

Thanks Joost, understood. I'll give it another shot. (I have to as it happens) . . .

(I retouched the sky in photoshop but have since spotted a mis-stitch, so it's back to control points again).

If only subtle mis-stitches could be flagged somehow (and repeating human subjects) - maybe in the PTGui Ai pipeline . . .

I appreciate everyone's input and diagnosis from the project files.

Best . . .

RH

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[John Houghton]

RH,  I've spent some time on trying to align your images and while I found no orientation issues, there appears to be serious parallax issues, particularly vertical parallax.  The attached image shows parallax effects at the zenith and there are also problems between rows at the sides.  I think you need to check the setup of your panorama head.

John

[Robin Hood]

Thanks John,

I always thought my parallax settings were calibrated perfectly for each of the sliding rails I set up for each lens, (this one 35mm FF), and each rail marked with the correct positions with precise white arrows indicating wher the body mounts..

Very strange. Back to the drawing board then. I'll test parallax again with two light stands and see if something has moved on the corresponding sliding rail.

Thanks for your time spent. (Only when you have time), do you mean 'align images' loaded all 28 images in Portrait format? Mine consistently load the last row as Landscape.

I guess I got used to everything other than the walls not having parallax issues (because they're always cropped out), the main aim maximising the big-sky when skies are spectacular . . .

Appreciated!

RH

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[John Houghton]

On Wednesday, November 16, 2022 at 8:46:55 PM UTC md20...@googlemail.com wrote:

Very strange. Back to the drawing board then. I'll test parallax again with two light stands and see if something has moved on the corresponding sliding rail.

The two light stands test only checks for horizontal parallax, and you have correctly adjusted your settings to eliminate that.  However, you need to also check for vertical parallax between rows.  See this example showing the vertical shift of the near window stuff against the distant background.  It must be 2-3cm !

Thanks for your time spent. (Only when you have time), do you mean 'align images' loaded all 28 images in Portrait format? Mine consistently load the last row as Landscape.

Align Images doesn't load anything.  I deselected the option to physically rotate the images with EXIF orientation BEFORE loading in the images and the images were then all in landscape orientation, as expected.  Then I ran Align Images.  The orientation tags in the EXIF data did, however, reveal mixed orientations:  The main images were in portrait orientation, but the zenith images were in landscape, due to bogus orientation data from the orientation sensor.

 

John

[John Houghton]

Correction:  After loading in the images (all in landscape), I did in fact click the rotate button to rotate them all into the proper portrait orientation before running Align Images.

John

[Robin Hood]

Useful info John, I agree that's pretty bad. I'm not as well versed as I thought.

I need to go back to school to work out the best way to achieve control over vertical parallax.

It seems I've been scraping by with PTGui coming to the rescue.

I'll search for a tutorial. Thanks for taking the time to illustrate my errors.

Looks like my idea for rotating images was also a red Herring :-)

RH

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[Robin Hood]

OK, that's useful as well John, thanks again.

Apologies to the user group for boring everyone with this thread!

RH

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