Building big pictures the easy way.

[ukwanderer]

What new program would you like to see ?


Do you long to take 20 or 30 shots at random, overlapping each other. In no particular order. Throw them through a snazzy FREE program and build an amazing Panoramic shot.

If so, I have news for you.

Autostitch is the world's first fully automatic 2D image stitcher. Capable of stitching full view panoramas without any user input whatsoever, Autostitch is a breakthrough technology for panoramic photography, VR and visualisation applications. This is the first solution to stitch any panorama completely automatically, whether 1D (horizontal) or 2D (horizontal and vertical).



Autostitch is built using cutting edge research from the AI lab at UBC, but it's incredibly simple to use! Just select a set of photos, and Autostitch does the rest: digital photos in, panoramas out.


http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html




Read an independant review* http://www.primidi.com/2005/04/19.html

I don't know what you think, but I'm extremely impressed. However, I would like to add a warning. If you want to generate the largest possible panorama (Go to the Options panel, and choose to scale to 100%), be prepared to wait, until you got plenty of memory!



and another at* http://photography.about.com/b/a/132280.htm

Trust me on this one. Even if you don't see a use for this program now, Download and Save this could get very expensive, very quickly.


When you have built your amazing shot it would look great in Zoomify. Read more...

http://www.photocamel.com/index.php/topic,4371.0.html


ukwanderer

[scoundrel1728]

Sounds something like Autopano. That program can be used standalone or as I use it - a plug-in for another program like PTAssembler, which I find to be a versatile package for stitching panoramas and mosaics. The Tawbaware site doesn't mention this, but I have also found PTAssembler useful for aligning handheld exposure exposure bracketed shots for later combining into a composite image with greater effective dynamic range when I didn't have a tripod handy.

[mikej]

Panorama Factory is a lot better and easier in my opinion.

http://www.panoramafactory.com/

Mike

[WHATSUP]

Panorama Factory is not free though*

[mikej]

No, Panorama Factory is not free, but it's worth the cost, considering what it does for the money. Some of the freebies do do a great job... but are not very user friendly or fast or have that many controls. I know that's not as important to some people, but I guess that's why there are both freebie and those that cost out there.

Mike

[Swiftmud]

Sounds like someone has used both PTAssembler and Panorama Factory. I've only used PTA myself. How does the speed compare?

[mikej]

With Panorama Factory, you start the program and bring in the images you want to stitch together. The only thing I do before I bring them into PF is convert from raw to tif file.

Once I have my images in the right order, I answer a couple of questions on if it's a full 360 degree image or a partial one (I've never done a 360 degree image so I don't what the difference is in the setup parameters). If the images have the exec info, it detects all of that and sets focal length and crop factor. Then I tell it to start and it goes through joining each image to the next, looking for the match up points, adjusts for distortion (to a point in auto mode), adjusts for exposure between images and creates the completed panorama image. Unless my exposure was way off between images, or I didn't get enough overlap, or my barrel distortion was way off, it does a pretty good job of joining everything up. There are also manual controls to do the overlay and adjustments, but I've only had to use them a few times... mostly when I was shooting close panoramas of a bunch of flowers (5 or more images across them) and some of the detail areas didn't line up because of distortion and I tried to tweak them into place.

With PTA, from the very little I've played with it, most of the work is manual and takes time. I'm sure once someone uses it awhile they can do a stitch job a lot faster. I also know that for percise control of the stitch job, PTA is hard to beat. I've just never had an image yet that I needed PTA's control and finess. Also, PTA does multiple level panoramas where PF only does one level. Being able to do multiple levels was why I got PTA and set it up, but I've yet to create images of a scene that would be worth doing a large panorama like that. I keep looking though.

Unless you need a lot of manual tweaking, PF really shines. If the images need a little more finess to get back together, then PTA would do a better job. I've not tried any others, so I don't know how well they do in that aspect.

Mike

[mikej]

Here is the 5 shot Yellow Lily I did:



Mike

[scoundrel1728]

Here's a picture where I stitched together an array of images 5 high x 2 across to fake a very wide-angle lens with PT Assembler...


And, despite the low viewpoint, my verticals are vertical and not converging at the top. I get this correction for free.

[mikej]

As I said, PTA does multiple level stitching, which PF does not. Either the building is not straight, or I do see some curvature in the ceiling lines in the upper left. Not that there are many paralle lines in this picture to be able to tell how well it compensated for barrel distortion. But a nice job anyway.

Mike