Clearly visible blending line in 360 of lake

[Johan Offermans]

Hi there,

I have been shooting 360s for a long time, but only very recently switched from the now defunct Auto Pano Giga to PT Gui. For those of you who are not familiar, Autopano Giga was a competitor for PT Gui from Kolor which is no longer supported, sold, or developed. I continued using it for a while, but figure it is time to move on.  In general, I am quite pleased with PT Gui - it is fast, easy to use and has great features.

Today, however, I was working on a 360 that I could not get to work properly in PT Gui, which works fine in Autopano. The subject contains a lake which has some ripples/waves on it. When I stitch this panorama in Autopano,  it blends the different photos together smoothly so it does not show where the images were blended.  When I stitch exactly the same source images in PT Gui, this results in a very clearly visible line where the images are blended.

I attached two cropped images of one of the seams which clearly shows the difference between PTGui and Autopano.

I tried some different settings in the panorama blending options in PT Gui, but none of my changes made any meaningful improvements in the result and it is easy to get overwhelmed by the number of settings/adjustments one can make in that section.

This is very likely an operator error as I am still new to PT Gui. What is the best way to get a smoother blend between these type of photos?

Thank you,

Johan

[John Houghton]

On Sun, Nov 22, 2020 at 8:31 PM Johan Offermans <photon...@thewanderers.net> wrote:

Today, however, I was working on a 360 that I could not get to work properly in PT Gui, which works fine in Autopano. The subject contains a lake which has some ripples/waves on it. When I stitch this panorama in Autopano,  it blends the different photos together smoothly so it does not show where the images were blended.  When I stitch exactly the same source images in PT Gui, this results in a very clearly visible line where the images are blended.

Johan, Try the new PTGui Pro V12 beta (download via link at the bottom of this page: https://www.ptgui.com/beta.html ).  This has a new smart blending option "Find optimum seams", which can be selected on the fly-out menu at the top right of the Panorama Editor window.  For earlier versions of PTGui, it was possible to make use of the alternative blender Smartblend (Windows), which offered a similar facility.  And of course with the Pro version you can use the mask option to adjust the seaming manually.

Even smart blenders may not give perfect (invisible) blending.  I think it's a good idea to anticipate such difficulties and if necessary take additional patching shots to cover wide expanses with the camera in landscape orientation, or even at an angle such that the diagonal of the frame is horizontal to give the absolute maximum horizontal fov.

John

[PTGui Support]

Hi Johan,

PTGui Pro 12 should do this much better. You can get it here:
https://www.ptgui.com/beta.html

Kind regards,

Joost Nieuwenhuijse
www.ptgui.com

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[Johan Offermans]

John and Joost,

Thank you for the quick response.  I did finally get around to downloading the latest PTGui Pro 12 today and can confirm that the result is indeed much better.  Great to see this improvement and the improvements of PT Gui in general. 

Johan