Lock the center image of the pano to prevent distortion?

[JL]

Hi PT people,

Hoping someone has insight.  What I want to do is shoot a 3-shot pano (on a nodal head), and have the center image locked, so it is not sized, warped, transformed in any way.  Once back in photoshop, I can then drop in any other images shot from that position, and they will line up perfectly.  Is there a way to do this?  I tried to manually zero out the transform settings, and create an individual lens profile that's all zeros as well.  Neither seems to work.  Dropping that same center image onto the blended stitch in PS, there is some warping happening in the stitch that isn't in the single image.

Thanks for any ideas!

[Erik Krause]

What is your output projection? And what is the angular field of view of
the complete panorama?

Even if the projection is rectilinear and the FoV less than about 120°
you will likely be out of luck. If there is significant lens distortion
your center image won't fit, since lens distortion in the overlap region
works in opposite directions.

However, there might be a solution, if you apply the same
(un-)distortion to all images you want to fit in the center. For this
you take your project and remove the outer images from that. Save this
project as a template and use it on all images you want to insert later,
f.e. using the Batch Builder (if you have the pro version).

It would of course be interesting to know what the goal of al this is.
Perhaps there are other solutions...

--
Erik Krause
http://www.erik-krause.de

[PTGui Support]

Did you set the panorama projection to the same projection as the source
image? E.g. both at rectilinear?

If you did that, and also set yaw, pitch, roll, abc, lensshift to zero,
then the output should not be warped.

As Erik says, some lens distortion correction may be necessary for a
seamless stitch, but perhaps you can get away by only applying lens
distortion correction to the two side images. Use Individual Lens
parameters to achieve this.

Happy to give it a try if you could post your images.

Kind regards,

Joost Nieuwenhuijse
www.ptgui.com

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[Bruce Hemming]

I'm assuming that you want to use a different lens to shoot the 'other' images otherwise you could just layer the the other image with the centre one and then stitch in the usual way.  You might have more success outputting to cube faces and then adding whatever it is that you want and matching the perspective by distorting the layered image.  I've done that quite a while ago (when there was that lovely little app CubicConvertor) but I don't see why it still couldn't be done.  Seems to me that you are trying to overcomplicate the process - but without more information it's hard to say.

[JL]

Thanks for all the replies!  I figured it out  =)  First to answer a couple of the questions...

No, using all the same lens.  Just 3 frames, left, center, right.  Rectilinear lens, rectilinear projection.

The purpose of this is to shoot one left frame, one right frame.  And many images in the center- people in different positions, for example.  In PS I will layer up all those center images for using various parts of each, but the important thing is that they all line up perfectly.  I can at any time go back and pick a new raw image and drop it over the center area in PS and it will line right up, without going through PT GUI a second time.

So there are 3 places I had to zero out things to prevent warping and lock the center image:

1. Lens Settings- create a separate profile for the center image, and zero it all out.

2. Image Parameters- zero out all the roll, etc.

3. Optimizer- No to adjust lens distortion.

Indeed, the stitch is not perfect.  Actually it's not as good as I hoped.  Might be more effort to fix stitch issues than to fix each center image.  Alternatively, I realize I could include the whole set of center images in PT GUI in the first place, link them together, and they would all warp together.  Only downside being if I want to add images later, I would have to go through that process again.  Will be testing it out, and see what ends up the best method.

In any case, I got my question answered, so thanks for the tips in the right direction!

-J

[MB]

I know this was posted 5 years ago now but have there been any updates to PTGUI to enable you to lock the center image to prevent it warping?

[PTGui Support]

Hi,

Not warping the center image has always been possible, as follows:

Start a new project
Load all images
Press Align Images and check that everything is aligned
Find your center image. Suppose it's number 4
Press Advanced
Go to Image Parameters
Change the yaw, pitch and roll of image 4 (your center image) to 0. This
puts it in the center.
Go to Optimizer
Select Anchor Image: image 4
Press Run Optimizer
If all went well, the image is still at yaw/pitch/roll = 0
Finally, go to the Panorama Editor and switch to rectilinear projection
Press the Fit Panorama button to adjust the field of view.

Kind regards,

Joost Nieuwenhuijse
www.ptgui.com

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