Curved lines instead of straight lines

[Carola de Poel - Panorama-Fotografie]

Hi Joost and others,

Lately I am having many problems with stitching 360 photo’s, especially when I am using a 6 meters long pole instead of a normal tripod. The most vertical and horizontal lines are not straight but curved.
Like a ‘smiley mirror’ (lachspiegel). 
I am using a Canon 5D mark III with a 8mm Samyang or sometimes a 12 mm Samyang lens or a 8mm Sigma lens. 
I mostly use in camera HDR (the camera generates the HDR image from 3 images with different exposure time).
The crop of the generated HDR image is much larger than from the original photo’s, Maybe that is part of the problem, when I use the bracketed images there is less distortion. In PTGUI 10 I mostly get a better result. Is it possible to reset the settings in PTGui 11? Maybe I accidentily did something wrong in the preferences.
The PTGui viewer crashes every time after a while. I submit the error in the attachment. And sometimes I get strange black stains in the panorama.
I hope you can advise me what to do to get good stitched panorama’s without curved lines. If you need the original files I can sent them too. 
Thank you very much.

Kind regards, Carola

P.s. Is it possible to ask a question in Dutch?

[PTGui Support]

Hi Carola,

The curved lines is a known issue, it should be solved in the next
update. For now you can work around the issue by going to Lens
Parameters, set the Fisheye Factor to 0 and re-optimize.

The crash seems to happen outside the PTGui Viewer code, while macOS is
updating the touch bar. It might be a problem in Mojave, I'm not sure
what can be done from PTGui's side.

There's a known issue causing black stains in tone mapped panoramas,
this will be fixed soon as well.

And it's fine to ask your questions in dutch or any other language, but
please include a google translated english copy of the text in your message.

Kind regards,

Joost Nieuwenhuijse
www.ptgui.com

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[Erik Krause]

Am 16.10.2018 um 09:17 schrieb PTGui Support:
> And it's fine to ask your questions in dutch or any other language, but
> please include a google translated english copy of the text in your message.

Better use https://www.deepl.com/ for translation.

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

[Carola de Poel - Panorama-Fotografie]

Hi Joost and Erik,

Thank you both very much for the quick respond!

I am not sure if I am doing the right thing, because it doesn't seem to work.

I change the Fisheye factor to 0 on the lens settings tab (see attachment).

Do I have to change anything else there? Or maybe at a different menu?

Kind regards, Carola

Op dinsdag 16 oktober 2018 09:17:17 UTC+2 schreef PTGui Support:

[Carola de Poel - Panorama-Fotografie]

Sorry, forgot the attachment of the lens settings tab. ;)

Op dinsdag 16 oktober 2018 00:40:11 UTC+2 schreef Carola de Poel - Panorama-Fotografie:

[PTGui Support]

Hi Carola,

Could you make the project available for download (source images +
project file)?

Kind regards,

Joost Nieuwenhuijse
www.ptgui.com

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[John Houghton]

On Tuesday, October 16, 2018 at 10:25:25 PM UTC+1, Carola de Poel - Panorama-Fotografie wrote:

Hi Joost and Erik,

Thank you both very much for the quick respond!

I am not sure if I am doing the right thing, because it doesn't seem to work.

I change the Fisheye factor to 0 on the lens settings tab (see attachment).

Do I have to change anything else there? Or maybe at a different menu?

Carola, You need to set the lens parameters (a,b,c) to 0 before re-optimizing following the setting of the fisheye factor to 0 - or use Project -> Initialise and Optimize to reset the parameters.  However, There are problems:

1. The image overlap is tiny (3% at the horizontal level). With the camera in portrait orientation, you should be shooting 4 shots around  instead of 3. Or shoot in landscape orientation.

2. Your control points are almost entirely on foliage, which is notorious for being in constant motion.

3. There may be minor parallax issues caused be movement of the top of the pole. 

You need a good spread of control points on stationary features for the evaluation of lens parameters to be carried out accurately. In this situation I would recommend the use of calibrated lens parameters via the application of a template shot in a more favorable situation.

My project file for these small images is attached.

John

[Carola de Poel - Panorama-Fotografie]

Hi Joost,

I will. I will sent you a link to a project later!

Kind regards, Carola

Op woensdag 17 oktober 2018 09:18:17 UTC+2 schreef PTGui Support:

[Carola de Poel - Panorama-Fotografie]

Thank you very much John!!!

It is true that 3 images are very little for overlap, but in general it works well. I will try to see if I get less distortion with using 4 images.

Do I understand that I have to set both the FisheyeFactor and lens distortion a + b + c to 0 at Lens settings before using Optimize? Do I have to check in the Optimizer at Global lens profile a + b + c or FisheyeFactor? I saw that you only checked b.

I do not quite understand how I can use a well-gestured 360 project as a template. Can I use such a project and then switch the images.

Thanks again for your help, I really appreciate it.

Kind regards, Carola

Op woensdag 17 oktober 2018 09:52:04 UTC+2 schreef John Houghton:

[John Houghton]

On Friday, October 19, 2018 at 12:39:01 PM UTC+1, Carola de Poel - Panorama-Fotografie wrote:

Thank you very much John!!!

It is true that 3 images are very little for overlap, but in general it works well. I will try to see if I get less distortion with using 4 images.

Do I understand that I have to set both the FisheyeFactor and lens distortion a + b + c to 0 at Lens settings before using Optimize?

Yes, that was what Joost recommended.

 

Do I have to check in the Optimizer at Global lens profile a + b + c or FisheyeFactor? I saw that you only checked b

 

a,b, and c affect the lens corrections in different zones of the image circle.  b is a general barrel distortion correction which is often all that's necessary.  With more complicated lenses there can be more complex distortions that benefit from the parameters a and c, but these do need more control points widely spread to be effectively optimized. If you include a and c in the optimization when the optimizer doesn't have enough points or they are placed on moving features or there are significant parallax issues, the result can be weird distortions.  Of course, you can simply run undo if that happens and try optimizing again with different settings.

 

I do not quite understand how I can use a well-gestured 360 project as a template. Can I use such a project and then switch the images.

Any project file can used as a template. What happens when you load some images into PTGui and then apply a template is that various parameter values get copied in from the template file to the corresponding parameters in the new project.  You have control over which parameters are copied in by checking the options in the Project Settings tab of the template project. You can also control what happens when you subsequently execute the Align Images function, or what happens if you use the template in a batch run.  

Generally, you apply a template using File->Apply template to a new set of images shot in a similar fashion to how the template images were shot.  In particular, you can copy in the lens parameters (which should not change from run to run) so that you don't have to trouble the optimizer to evaluate them all over again, with the risk that it might not get them right owing to particular circumstances (not enough control points, not enough overlap etc). You can just exclude the a,b,c parameters from the optimization by unchecking those lens parameters on the Advanced panel of the optimizer tab. Or simply select No to the option to minimize lens distortion  if you use the Simple panel of the Optimizer.

John