Best panorama software
Alfred Molon
and stiching them together is a problem.
Is there any panorama software which will do the following:
1. automatically remove the barrel distortion
2. adjust the exposure (the camera will lock the exposure, but sometimes
the clouds move and the overall brightness will change)
3. correctly rotate each individual picture so that they are all aligned
4. for each picture choose which part will be added to the panorama
sequence
5. if there are some "holes" in the final product fill them by cloning
I could of course do all this manually, but is there any panorama
software which is sophisticated enough to do everything automatically ?
--
Alfred Molon
------------------------------
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Olympus4040_5050/
Olympus 4040 resource - http://www.molon.de/4040.htm
Olympus 5050 resource - http://www.molon.de/5050.htm
Paul Worden
Assembler, that makes it easier to use. (but not simple - it's a powerful
program.)
Paul W
Jim G
> I have taken some panorama sequences taken at wide angle without tripod
> and stiching them together is a problem.
>
> Is there any panorama software which will do the following:
>
> 1. automatically remove the barrel distortion
> 2. adjust the exposure (the camera will lock the exposure, but sometimes
> the clouds move and the overall brightness will change)
> 3. correctly rotate each individual picture so that they are all aligned
> 4. for each picture choose which part will be added to the panorama
> sequence
> 5. if there are some "holes" in the final product fill them by cloning
>
> I could of course do all this manually, but is there any panorama
> software which is sophisticated enough to do everything automatically ?
Although I am not an expert at Panoramic picture taking, I think it is
best to keep your focal length around 50mm(equiv) so you don't have
the distortion.
I use Panarama Factory - works pretty good.
Jim Gregerson
Every Photo is a single moment in time.
http://www.showtelinc.com/aphoto2.htm
perspicacious
pincushion/barrel distortion with the click of a button. So you can do this
"automatically".
While Panorama Tools is one of the best tools around, it is definitely not
automatic when it comes to stitching.
GT
"Alfred Molon" <alfred_mo...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:7b981d811e13c285...@news.meganetnews.com...
Dierk Haasis
>Although I am not an expert at Panoramic picture taking, I think it is
>best to keep your focal length around 50mm(equiv) so you don't have
>the distortion.
Not quite. The longer the lens the better - with smaller angle of view
you need more pictures but have less distortion. This could actually
be achieved with a wide angle lens - not a fisheye! - if you have more
than sufficient overlap, hence creating more pictures you'll lose the
distortion. Downside: only a minimal fraction of the photo is used.
This holds true if you don't change the perspective, that is, don't
move towards the object; the point of view (photography) has to be the
same for various lenses, then you maintain perspective. Easily proven
by taking a tele photo from an object and then - without moving - with
a wide angle lens. Afterwards you blow up from the wide angle shot the
same area he tele photo shows.
--
Dierk
Roland Karlsson
news:pcm9evobrp4a0a84k...@4ax.com:
> Not quite. The longer the lens the better - with smaller angle of view
> you need more pictures but have less distortion.
Using Panorama Tools you can correct for distorion.
Roland
Roland Karlsson
@sccrnsc02:
> While Panorama Tools is one of the best tools around, it is definitely not
> automatic when it comes to stitching.
I have used several tools. I find Panorama Tools to be the best.
It is not automatic, but you can fix faults that
automatic tools cannot fix IMHO.
Roland
Mark Weaver
"Dierk Haasis" <Dierk....@Write4U.de> wrote in message
news:pcm9evobrp4a0a84k...@4ax.com...
> On 9 Jun 2003 06:07:15 -0700, jimg...@hotmail.com (Jim G) wrote:
>
> >Although I am not an expert at Panoramic picture taking, I think it is
> >best to keep your focal length around 50mm(equiv) so you don't have
> >the distortion.
>
> Not quite. The longer the lens the better - with smaller angle of view
> you need more pictures but have less distortion. This could actually
> be achieved with a wide angle lens - not a fisheye! - if you have more
> than sufficient overlap, hence creating more pictures you'll lose the
> distortion. Downside: only a minimal fraction of the photo is used.
>
I believe that most of the automatic stitchers correct for distortion --
Photovista certainly does. I use the full 28mm equiv wide angle for most of
my panoramas because you get a lot more vertical coverage that way and an
aspect ratio that is more pleasing (to my eyes anyway). Of course you could
stitch mutliple rows of images with PanoTools, but that gets to be real work
;)
Mark
Paul Worden
image in Photoshop (if you wish.)
But it is complex and (relatively) slow.
The multi layers enables some fine tuning to be done and for the user to
choose where the joins are.
Photovista does a reasonable job but doesn't match colour and density very
well and often leaves ghosting. As pointed out, it also requires all images
to be identical size. If the original images are bright, well overlapped,
level and all the same exposure, it's an easy program to use that produces a
good result.
I've tried the demo of RealViz, which does a brilliant job of matching
colour and density and gives seamless blends - but I'm having trouble
finding out the differences between the demo and the 'full' version. RealViz
has a nice drag and drop that allows 'jigsaw' montage panoramas on more than
one level.
For the time, I'll stick with Pan Tools.
Paul W
Brad Templeton
Ed Ruf <EG*nospam*R...@cox.net> wrote:
>On Mon, 9 Jun 2003 19:04:20 +0100, in rec.photo.digital "GT" <nos...@co.uk>
>wrote:
>
>>You could try Panavue Imageassembler, does most of these things.
>
>PhotoVista, Aftershot, etc and keep coming back to Image Assembler. One
>particularly annoying requirement of PF is that it requires all your image
>to be identically sized, at least the free version. Many of the
>autostitchers tend to have problems when one of the images has more
>rotation to it than the others. I've found I can get much better stitches
>when that is the case, by first slightly rotating the image. The resulting
>single color additions drive some stitchers crazy and if you crop to
>eliminate this, some like PF refuse to stitch, as the images are not a
>single size.
No one program is the best. There seem to be 4 leaders.
a) PanoTools for Photoshop
Among the most flexible but also considered by far the most
work.
b) Photovista
Very easy to use. It uses an unusual blending algorithm that
does the blend over a narrow winding stripe that tries to wind
through background areas. Sometimes this sucks (clear lines in
the sky) but it's the only one that's really good at handling
scenes with tons of moving objects like people, cars, waving
trees. Also seems to be able to handle any size pano at all.
Poor amount of fine control, no ability to save settings etc.
c) Panorama Factory
Very flexible, fine-tune feature is great, but does wide blends
so can't handle many moving people. However, the fine tune
lets you handle paralax, which I don't believe any other
package can do. I've used PF to shoot 360 degree views from
the top of towers where I had to walk around the tower, such
as my CN Tower pano (www.templetons.com/brad/pano/canada.html)
d) Image Assembler
This one is able to do tilted panos, multi-row panos, and handle
errors in camera rotation from handholding, with a nice
interface. Frankly, I have never liked its blends when I
have tried it, however. PanoTools can do these things but
again is a lot more work.
--
Visit Burning Man 2000 in my photojournals
http://www.templetons.com/brad/photo/bm00
Bart van der Wolf
"Brad Templeton" <b...@templetons.com> wrote in message
news:j6qFa.938554$Zo.212412@sccrnsc03...
SNIP
> No one program is the best. There seem to be 4 leaders.
> a) PanoTools for Photoshop
With a GUI, like PTAssembler (http://www.tawbaware.com/ptasmblr.htm), one
doesn't need Photoshop.
Bart
Terje Mathisen
Actually, even PT + PTA won't try to do any cloning to automatically
'fill in the blanks', but if you have PhotoShop for the back-end work,
PT is the closest you're going to get.
Terje
--
- <Terje.M...@hda.hydro.com>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
Terje Mathisen
> Although I am not an expert at Panoramic picture taking, I think it is
> best to keep your focal length around 50mm(equiv) so you don't have
> the distortion.
Pretty much all lenses, at least zoom lenses, exhibit some distortion.
PanoTools allow you to define the third-order approximation to how this
varies as a function of the distance from the lens center, and it also
allows for the situation where the lens center isn't the same as the
image center.
With the correction factors I have measured for my Oly D40Z in both wide
angle and tele modes, I get near-perfect stitches even if the lens
itself exhibit gullwing distortion in wide-angle mode.
Terje Mathisen
Bart, I'm sure Brad have tried (and currently use) one of the front ends.
What he means is probably that you need PhotoShop to be able to use the
multi-layer output from PT.
Multi-layer is needed if you want to do manual fine-tuning of all the
stitches, it is _the_ key feature for panos with lots of people in them.
I.e. take a look at this "anthill", with maybe 500-1000 people around
the swimming pools of a RCCL cruise liner:
http://norloff.org/cruise/swimming_pools.jpg
Please also notice that I took that pano handheld, which means that I
also had to hide/get rid of parallax errors, particularly in the
foreground, on most of the joints.