Stitching software-CS5, PT GUI, Kolor's Autopano pro or something else?

[SeanBK]

I need to delve more into Pano photography. I find my older CS3 seems rather archaic. I have the usual crtical equipment > Gitzo & heavier Bogen Tripods, RRS Ultimate-Pro Omni-Pivot Package. Am familiar & have created panos, but seems like software is much sophisticated now, especially with HDR Pano. So any suggestions?
 Earlier this year Bernard L suggested Kolor's Auto Pano pro, though as I recall he always recommended PT GUI, what changed? I will be getting CS5 soon, so should I just let CS5 do the work or CS5 plus something else. I thought of stitching each exposure separately then dump all 3 or 5 stitced Panos in HDR. My Intel pentium i7 with 8gb RAM and plenty storage should handle it.
 Thanks for all input, appreciate thetime.
   Sincerely
    Sean

[louoates]

For me CS5 pano stitching is so good I dumped all my special tripod gear. Most of my pans now are via my 200mm zoom Canon handheld with IS. I have a grid pattern in my view eyepiece from Canon so it's no problem keeping my horizontals and verticals close enough. And if I overlap shots by 20-30% it works every time. Most of my large canvases up to 10' long are done that way via 4-8 exposures. CS5 stitching and content-aware fill are a god-send for easy pans. I'm not sure what computer power specs are necessary but CS5 is so good I wouldn't mind reading a book or two while it works.

[bill t.]

CS5 stitching is OK for almost all landscape panos.  But in cases where you are using a wide angle lens tilted significantly up or down, you may have problems that are best solved by PTGui or some similar package.  I have several architectural interiors in that category that CS5 simply can't handle.  Its blending is also excellent, and my first choice over any other package's blending.

I would recommend against stitching and then doing HDR, especially if you are using CS5 stitching.  With CS5 you should always stitch pre-processed HDR images.  You have no control over alignment choices in CS5, and it will stitch your bright, normal, and dark exposures slightly differently which will produce unattractive fringing and moire patterns in HDR processing.  And of course that's even more pronounced when your originals were hand held, but even from a tripod you get some stitching variation.  Here's where PTGui has some advantage...you can stitch one of the tripod-shot image sets and then apply those parameters directly to the other sets.  And of course PTGui has it's own built in HDR processor which wasn't that great when I last looked over a year ago, but maybe it's better now.  But in general any set of pano originals will have quite a bit of exposure variation going left to right across the image, which is another good reason for HDR'ing before stitching, it gives another tool to balance that out on a panel-by-panel basis.

[SeanBK]

Thank you guys for detailed explanation. I appreciate it, seems like CS5 & ptgui is a way to go.
  Appreciate your reply.
 Sean

[BernardLanguillier]

I would also consider Autopano Giga 2.5.

Easier and faster to use than PTgui if you want very high quality results 99% of the time without having to do anything at all manually.

Cheers,
Bernard

[jeremydillon]

Microsoft ICE is fast and accurate and FREE. Give it a try before spending any money.

[BernardLanguillier]

Microsoft ICE is fast and accurate and FREE. Give it a try before spending any money.

Free is a malicious business practise that has been known for tens of years as dumping.

It kills innovation and projects us in a world of large monopolies where ads will end up covering every inch of our own faces.

I'd rather pay my PTgui and Autopano pro licenses.

Cheers,
Bernard

[SeanBK]

Thank you Bernard. Appreciate the input from the Master of stitching.
  AutoPano Giga 2.5 looks very interesting. I need to download trial version first, as it is rather steep.
    Sean

[Michael Bailey]

My two cents:

I've been very happy with PT Gui. Yes, it takes a while to learn, but John Houghton's excellent tutorials are a great help.

http://www.johnhpanos.com/tuts.htm

I tried Autopano (not Autopano Giga) a few years ago, and it worked well but, for my system at least, the processing times were at least five times longer than PT Gui's. Also, although Autopano has some nice features, like automatically finding the "stitchable" pictures in a given folder, I didn't feel they were all that useful. Once the novelty wore off, I found plain old dragging and dropping into PT Gui worked just fine. Maybe I'd have liked Autopano better if I'd stuck with it longer, but I didn't have the patience to figure out two programs with very dissimilar controls.

As has been noted already, if you're only creating landscape scale panoramics, almost anything will do the job. That applies to software, and hardware, too. If nothing's close to the camera, parallax isn't an issue, so you're free to hand-hold and process with Photoshop, Panorama Factory, whatever you like. It's when you start shooting indoors and into the spherical world that everything gets much more interesting (read: painful, expensive, frustrating, but rewarding). Then you need a dedicated piece of software to accompany your specialist panoramic tripod head. Again, PT Gui is my choice. (And Nodal Ninja gets my vote for pano head.)

If you are shooting hand-held panoramics, here's an unsolicited suggestion: When you run into a setting which includes some foreground element (historical marker, phone pole, your spouse), try to fit the whole object into one shot of the sequence, even if that means going back and taking an extra frame. Then mask out or otherwise eliminate that object wherever it appears in other frames. This technique eliminates the parallax between near and far elements because they both now live in a single frame.

MB

[rschlierbeck]

I would like to also put in a vote for Autopano. The current version is superb and well worth a small amount of time to try out the trial. You may not feel it's much trouble to drag and drop your images into place in other software but think of Autopano as a tool. The automatic features are just part of the tool and offer a starting point should you feel like dragging the images yourself.

Scott

[Peter McLennan]

I get excellent results with CS5 and hand-held panos.  They're nearly all low-stress landscapes, though.  Longish lenses and no close foreground elements.

I don't know if the other software will stitch RAW files directly, but being able to stitch RAW directly from Bridge is a real time-saver.