Optimizer: Going from Good --> Very Good
susan
"Good"
What steps can I take to consistently achieve "very good"?
PTGui Support
Are you using a panoramic head?
Joost
John Riley
Sorry for the lack of practical and useful information.
John
John Riley
john...@chesnet.net
(h)864-461-3504
(c)864-431-7075
(w)864-503-5775
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "PTGui" group.
> To post to this group, send email to pt...@googlegroups.com
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to ptgui+un...@googlegroups.com
> Please do not add attachments to your posts; instead you may upload files at
> http://groups.google.com/group/ptgui/files
> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/ptgui
mcz...@gmail.com
particular camera and lens combo is set up correctly.
Get your self set up as level as possible. Using a leveling head is
quite the time saver here.
When taking your shots, use the remote. Its just too easy to cause some
jitter if you use the button on the camera.
Shots that are either too light or too dark tend to obscure detail that
ptgui uses to establish control points.
I usually optimize until I get all control points down to just under 2,
which gives me a Very Good. On rare occasion I've got the Too Good to be
True. Usually I can get down to 2 without having to drop very many points.
---
Aside from that, I usually run my RAW shots through a program like DXO
(Lightroom or even Adobe Raw will do as well) and make some prelim
adjustments for light, saturation, vibrancy, ect. Then take TIFFs
exported out of that and feed them to PTGui. If I was planning to do
sharpening, I leave it to do to the output out of Ptgui.
Erik Krause
It is harder to get "very good" for sphericals from fisheye images but
easy for cylindricals from rectilinear images.
However, if your pano head is set up correctly and you don't have too
much near foreground (fisheye parallax can't be avoided totally - only
minimized) you even should get "Very good" for sphericals. Another
possibility is to delete the worst control points (I use APClean for
this task).
--
Erik Krause
http://www.erik-krause.de
Hugo Rodriguez
at the same time is extremely powerful for who want to control every little
aspect of the assembly of a pano.
Joost, I would suggest you some features that I think would be very useful:
- On the control points panel, the ability to scroll through the image as in
Photoshop (by holding down the space bar) would be very useful.
- In the same tab, the ability to simultaneously dragg both toolbars with
some shortcut key while dragging one of them.
- The ability to zoom in PS as it would also be very useful (while holding
down Ctrl + Space plus clic and with Alt to zoom minus)
- A way to see where is the blend zone between shots, which perfectly
complement the new option to see seams. And to adjust dinamically it's
thickness.
- To accept Photoshop plugins (.8 bf), to apply certain effects would go
very well (some plugins of focus, noise reduction, photomatix, etc ...). If
you could choose if they apply before the final assembly or processing it
would also be fantastic.
- The ability to edit the response curves with precision camera would
correct some cases where problems occur, typically posterization.
Hope you find them useful too.
Regards,
Hugo Rodriguez
John Houghton
> Get your self set up as level as possible. Using a leveling head is
> quite the time saver here.
John
PTGui Support
Thanks for the feedback.
On 11/22/2010 11:52 PM, Hugo Rodriguez wrote:
> - On the control points panel, the ability to scroll through the image as in
> Photoshop (by holding down the space bar) would be very useful.
You can use the right mouse button, or Ctrl+drag.
Additionally hold down Alt for fast scrolling.
Using the space bar is tricky from a technical point of view.
> - In the same tab, the ability to simultaneously dragg both toolbars with
> some shortcut key while dragging one of them.
I'm sorry but I don't understand what you mean..
Joost
Keith Martin
>When using a panno head, check and double check to make sure your
>particular camera and lens combo is set up correctly.
>
>Get your self set up as level as possible. Using a leveling head is
>quite the time saver here.
>
>When taking your shots, use the remote. Its just too easy to cause
>some jitter if you use the button on the camera.
>
>Shots that are either too light or too dark tend to obscure detail
>that ptgui uses to establish control points.
Good points. It is very easy to assume things are set correctly, and
also to introduce problems by jogging the camera when shooting, or
even causing the tripod to shift by stepping next to it on some
floors.
But levelling isn't something that affects parallax and the quality
of the optimisation. It *is* important for cylindricals, to avoid
having to crop the stitched result too much. But it is merely a
convenience for sphericals, as they can be re-levelled in PTGui as
much as you like without impacting on the optimising process.
(Mind you, I do my best to get level anyway; I can't guarantee
finding a reliable vertical line or horizon in many of my panos.)
k
Keith Martin
>It is harder to get "very good" for sphericals from fisheye images
>but easy for cylindricals from rectilinear images.
I normally get Very Good and I've seen the Too Good To Be True
declaration a couple of times with my work, which is so far
exclusively fisheye-based. I use a very precise head, solid tripod,
and a wireless shutter release. I also place points manually and make
sure that:
(a) I spread my control points out rather than clustering them together;
(b) I only use a small number of points, typically four per pair;
(c) I am careful what parts of the scene I use, foreground to
background, where I can; and
(d) I try to work around the same general near-but-not-on perimeter
areas of the shots.
(And these days I just shoot three around, so there's not so much
scope for going wrong. :-)
But I don't chase the 'Too Good' report, I just aim for Very Good and
as low an average and maximum CP distance as I can get without hours
of work. Joost posted about the 'Too Good' message back in September:
>The more parameters you optimize, the more important it is to have
>well spread out control points. In particular the 'too good to be
>true' message usually means exactly that. You may have all control
>points clustered in a small part of the overlap area. PTGui then
>adjust the lens settings until the control points match exactly, but
>there can be big misalignments outside the area covered by control
>points. This happens easily in images with large plain white areas
k
JPS
points ?
Very often, the program sets quite a lot of "auto CP" very near one to
another... It seems that deleting the highest figures -as long as
there are more than 3 or 4 CP evenly distributed- helps going from
GOOD to VERY GOOD, without altering the result, at the contrary !
;)
J-P.
l_d_allan
significant difference to use "Heavy + Lens Shift" for the Advanced
Optimizer tab setting for "Minimize Lens Distortion".
Hugo Rodriguez
> You can use the right mouse button, or Ctrl+drag.
> Additionally hold down Alt for fast scrolling.
> Using the space bar is tricky from a technical point of view.
I didn't know that tip. Thanks for it.
> > - In the same tab, the ability to simultaneously dragg both toolbars
with
> > some shortcut key while dragging one of them.
>
> I'm sorry but I don't understand what you mean..
Oh, yes, I mean that when you start a pano without placing automatically CPs
and without optimizing -for example, aplying a template- when you drag a
image in the CP tab, the other doesn't follow it until you have placed 3 or
4 points, but that's the number of points I place before changing to another
couple of images, so I have to drag them one by one. It would be very useful
to drag both even if there are not CPs, with another tip like the one you
explained before.
Regards,
Hugo Rodriguez
PTGui Support
> Oh, yes, I mean that when you start a pano without placing automatically CPs
> and without optimizing -for example, aplying a template- when you drag a
> image in the CP tab, the other doesn't follow it until you have placed 3 or
> 4 points, but that's the number of points I place before changing to another
> couple of images, so I have to drag them one by one. It would be very useful
> to drag both even if there are not CPs, with another tip like the one you
> explained before.
In Options/Preferences - Control Point Editor:
'Enable Auto Add and Link Scrollbars with less than 2 control points'.
This requires that the images are already placed roughly in position;
PTGui uses this information to determine how the scrollbars should be
linked.
Joost
Kelly
In addition to some of the other remarks already posted, the auto-
generated control points may benefit from beforehand mitigating the
effects of chromatic aberration as discussed by John Houghton...
somewhere - I just tried finding the article which I'm fairly certain
that he prepared, but am unsuccessful. Regardless, while making
general wholesale tweaks to all images (for a given pano), I now
routinely reduce the CA through Adobe Camera Raw in route to making
TIFFs for PTGui because of what John wrote.
Kind regards,
Kelly
Erik Krause
> How about simply DELETING higher than say 3.0 or even 2.0 control
> points ?
If you do that globally you risk to delete all control points of a
certain image pair (zenith shots often have few and bad CPs).
You can either use PTGui "Delete worst control points" for this task
(although it seems not to be very effective sometimes), or APClean,
which is my favorite. APClean will delete CPs in images with lots of
them but not if there are only few - based on a statistical approach.
However, you need to know what you are doing, otherwise you might delete
CPs that wouldn't have a large distance if you set the optimizer
correctly...
JPS
MANUALLY the CP higher than 2 for exemple, but checking in CONTROL
POINTS windows where they are... and only deleting those too near to
another one, and trying to keep as few CPs, but well spaced within the
image ! On top of that, I regularly ADD CPs near the top and bottom,
where PTGui rarely puts any !
Cheers,
J-P.
Hugo Rodriguez
Thanks for the tip. I didn't know it but this option didn't help, because it
didn't let me place points. I usually want to place point on the right side
of the first image (at left panel) and the left side of the second image
(which is at the right panel). But this option always keep showing the same
side of both images.
But this can be solved easily: simply pressing another key (like Alt, shift
or Alt+shift) or dragging with the third button (the middle button/ball
button) of the mouse or by pressing simultaneosly left and right button
while dragging.
This way, when you have the same detail on both panels, you choose to drag
them at the time or not.
Hope you put it on the wish list ;)
Hugo Rodriguez
> -----Mensaje original-----
> De: pt...@googlegroups.com [mailto:pt...@googlegroups.com] En
> nombre de PTGui Support
> Enviado el: jueves, 25 de noviembre de 2010 12:30
> Para: pt...@googlegroups.com
> Asunto: Re: [PTGui] Suggestions for PTgui
PTGui Support
The images should be pre-aligned in the panorama editor. Then PTGui
knows in which way they overlap so it can lock the scrollbars. For
example it will then know that the right side of image 1 overlaps with
the left side of image 2. You can use a template to prealign.
I've noted your other suggestions, thanks.
Joost