I have a retouching project for a client who shot film... fairly wide angle and needs all the shots stitched together. The shots are complex with structures and telephone lines and such.
The problem is that they are not shot very coherently with the grid-like approach to shooting.
Bending my layers manually in Photoshop is getting me part of the way there but I'm wondering if Capture One or another software will analyze the data and stitch/morph the images together without metadata (because they are film scans).
Hi Josh,
Sounds like a typical challenge that
PTGUI would have relatively little difficulty with. It uses image features, not just metadata, and the data that is needed (like focal length and type of lens) can be manually entered if it's not present in the file header metadata, and then optionally gets improved further based on image features (perhaps the nominal focal length of the lens isn't exact, or the lens is decentered a bit). You can even drag the individual image tiles in their approximate position in a preview, which makes it easier to manually add control points (if the program cannot already find them automatically).
Of course, even PTGUI may run into difficulties if the images are shot sloppy, handheld, or with different focal lengths, or with different focus settings, but it does have the technical capability to solve most of those issues the best way that is technically possible while respecting normal geometrical projections and smart blending of overlapping areas. For those sloppy input jobs it may need a bit more handholding, but if it's possible, then PTGUI should be able to do it. It can also output layered and masked output for further retouching if needed.
I suggest using a dedicated stitching tool like PTGUI for a dedicated task like this. It also uses better resampling algorithms, so even for easier jobs it already produces better quality anyway. It also offers more projection methods to choose from, and has additional relative horizontal stretching/compression capabilities for extreme angles of view, and opportunities to address things like ghosting artifacts. It also handles large image files (such as scans) better, by swapping data to disk if needed instead of swamping RAM and the OS to a grinding hold.
Cheers,
Bart
