Looking for alternative to AutoPano Giga

[Jim Kasson]

i've used AutoPano Giga successfully for years, and it's now reached a level of stability that allows me to do several things at once, but I've recently run into difficulties with handheld stitches trying to get just the right images in the group to be stitched.
Yesterday, I made the exposures for this image:



and today I stitched it. The process of selecting the right set of images for this picture was time consuming. It was easy to find the ones with the worst artifacts, but I couldn’t toss out so many images that I didn’t have coverage in some area. There was a lot of trial and error involved, and AutoPano Giga didn’t make it easy on me. Even with the thumbs set to as large as they’d go, they weren’t big enough for me to see all that I needed to. I ended up having to go back to Lr to look at each one, which made the whole process less fun and longer than it otherwise would have been.

Another problem was that I couldn’t figure out how to make the window where the thumbs were displayed large enough that I could see all the thumbs at the same time.

Maybe this is because I have a 2560×1600 pixel display. If that’s the case, it’s about to get worse; I have a 4K NEC color managed display on order.

Can anyone recommend another stitching program, or suggest a way around my current AutoPano problems?

Platform is Win 7 x64
Images frequently stitch to more than 2GB files.
I love the way that AutoPano can use all 12 of my cores and well over 128GB of RAM, and I'd hate to give that up.
I think AutoPano does a great job from a technical point of view.

Thanks,

Jim

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

Can anyone recommend another stitching program, or suggest a way around my current AutoPano problems?

Hi Jim,

Autopano Giga works great when it can do it's stuff automatically, but I also struggle if I want or need to intervene manually.

PTGUI Pro is my personal favorite for those situations, and I also like its colormanagement better. It's very fast because it uses the GPUs, and it offers a lot of specific functionality for recurring tasks. Having more projection models is also very useful.  The pro version offers some (for me) useful additional features. Support is usually very good if needed, and there is a huge worldwide userbase one can turn to for questions, if the on-line tutorials don't already do the job.

Cheers,
Bart

[kirkt]

I agree with Bart.  PTGui's interface and toolset is much more intuitive and efficient, and the new version enables GPU.  Its viewpoint correction is robust and its masking interface is simple and effective.  Etc.

kirk

[Alan Smallbone]

I will also recommend Ptgui Pro, very useful program and works really well. I have been a long time user.

Alan

[bill t.]

Gorgeous image, I'm jealous!

Yup.  PTGui is the most geometrically savvy stitcher out there.  Still better than PS for wideangle lenses with extreme tilts up and down.

I personally have very little love for the Gigapan system.  Relatively small numbers of carefully manually positioned and focused images can beat a rag-tag, sloppy, automated mob of Gigapan images any day, IMHO.  Some incrementally marked paper bands taped to a tripod head is all one needs for accurate positioning on multi-rows.  Throw in some focus bracketing for the closer panels, and the angels will sing.

[Jim Kasson]

Gorgeous image, I'm jealous!

Yup.  PTGui is the most geometrically savvy stitcher out there.  Still better than PS for wideangle lenses with extreme tilts up and down.

I personally have very little love for the Gigapan system.  Relatively small numbers of carefully manually positioned and focused images can beat a rag-tag, sloppy, automated mob of Gigapan images any day, IMHO.  Some incrementally marked paper bands taped to a tripod head is all one needs for accurate positioning on multi-rows.  Throw in some focus bracketing for the closer panels, and the angels will sing.

Thanks. You can tell from the above image that I'm throwing "careful" out the window when I'm doing these IR trees.

http://blog.kasson.com/?p=8750

Jim

[bill t.]

David Hockney is not very careful, either.  Who would buy that stuff?

[Jim Kasson]

Downloaded PTGui Pro. Tried it. Think it's going to work. The filmstrip images are too small and I can't make them bigger, but I can get a good look in the masking window. Need to work on taming the exposure blending.



Thanks to everybody.

Jim

[bill t.]

Best place to tame the exposures is in Lightroom.  Select only the pictures of interest, then flip over to Library mode.  Locate the word "Export" at the bottom-left  Just to your right of that there are four images of boxes within boxes.  Click on the fourth one, it will give you a view of your images snuggled up against each other.  Good reference for balancing, but you have to switch back to Edit mode to adjust.  Also useful to watch the histograms in Edit mode as you flip from image to image, try to make the various peaks more or less consistent from image to image, especially the blue sky peak.

PTGui can output a layered Photoshop stack, where you can then place a clipped adjustment layer above each separate image, and make adjustment prior to using PS's "Edit-Aute Blend Layers" to join the images into a single layer, or rather a blended stack ready to be flattened.

Looked at your page, very nice set, you've found a great subject!

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

Downloaded PTGui Pro. Tried it. Think it's going to work. The filmstrip images are too small and I can't make them bigger, but I can get a good look in the masking window. Need to work on taming the exposure blending.

Hi Jim,

You can also drag and drop individual images when in the Panorama Editor window (CTRL-E), in case the Control points cannot be found automatically and you want to help the pano by adding some manual control points. When using handheld shots as input, there will always be some parallax issues if the image has depth. It helps to let the stitcher (after initial general optimization) individually optimize the horizontal/vertical shift parameters as well. They complicate the optimization process significantly by adding a few more degrees of freedom to the solver, so you need enough control points on the overlaps.

As for blending, you can also try a Plug-in called SmartBlend. It's no longer being maintained or updated, but it runs fine on my x64 system. It occasionally/usually offers amazing blends, especially when ghosting may be a problem and you do not want to mask image tiles manually (if avoidable).

Lovely images!

Cheers,
Bart