Dear all,
I have spent more time stitching recently, and have reached some conclusions that I thought might interest some of you.
To start, I am absolutely delighted with Stitcher 5.03 from Realviz, and the quality of the automatic stitch is very impressive. I got some perfect 13.000 wide stitches made from images shot with my d2x and a 70-200 f2.8. Those images had been converted from RAW using RSP. Stitcher is expensive, but the gains in terms of time appear to be huge.
I did however find some imperfections when trying to stitch images shot using my Nikkor 12-24 that does, like all wide angle zooms, suffer from some distorsion at its extreme focals.
I tried the same stitch with images converted using the DxO Optics Pro 3.5 RAW converter, and the result was improved very significantly. I am still not completely sold on the RAW conversions delivered by Optics Pro in terms of sharpness compared to the quality produced by RSP, but I am just starting with the software. Even so, the improvement of the stitches alone is probably worth the investement for those serious about stitching.
It might be possible to get the same benefits by converting first with plug-ins like PT lens though, I'll investigate this too.
The bottomline is that I am getting impressive A2 stitches with a few mouse clicks using first DxO Optics Pro, followed by the automatic stitching of Stitcher 5.03.
Regards,
Bernard