Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Digital Image Processing => Topic started by: BernardLanguillier on June 20, 2005, 02:48:01 am
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Ray,
Thanks for your answer.
Yep, I also managed to export in .psd, but the masks are just not as useful as I was hoping. I was probably over-expecting based on my first very positive impression of the software.
My hope was that the layered .psd file would look just like the finished stiched, with masks controlling the tansition between the images.
I probably need to test a bit more.
I did indeed not see any problems in the sky, but I saw some in grass in the foreground where the circular bottom edge of the images appeared a little bit. I had shot too close to the edge which is why this problem shows up. Had I taken a bit more clearance I could crop easily this small part.
Regards,
Bernard
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Anybody else using Realviz stitcher? I find it does an incredible job, though is slow if you use the layered and masked psd output mode.
Hi Jack,
I do happen to have bought a license some time ago based on the feedback of a friend using it professionally.
Everybody else is saying great things about it, but I just could never manage to get good results out of it, probably as a result of me not devoting enough time to learn to master it.
Panoramas have not yet become a significant part of my shooting, which probably explains my problems. Your posts encourages me to try some more... :-)
Regards,
Bernard
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My concern would be lost opportunities whilst stuffing around.
I can take three images -- a left, center, and right with the counter-shifts -- in less than 30 seconds.
And yes, you definitely need to be on a tripod, but you do not need any fancy head. I have an RRS L-bracket on my camera with hash marks to index the camera shifts.
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I would say to first choose a focal range range based on your personal "vision" -- IOW how you "see" you landscapes.
When you stitch, you end up with a wider view, on average about 1/3 wider on a full-frame camera so a 50 shifted and stitched is about like a 32 or so.
IMPORTANT! Note that with smaller sensor, you effectively end up with an even wider FOV after the stitch. With 1.6x sensor cameras you can nearly double the frame for an effective FOV about 2x as wide as the primary lens. Now the same 50mm which is 80mm after the sensor crop factor, gets halved and now generates around a 40mm net effective FOV.
Make sense?
Also note that the aspect ratios and corresponding perspectives will differ depending on whether you stich the frames with the camera horizontally oriented as opposed to doing the same with the camera vertically oriented on the tripod.
FWIW, I use the 90TSE, Mamiya 50 and Oly 24 about equally on my full-frame 1Ds2 depending on the nature of my subject. With a 1.6x camera I would probably consider starting with something in the 24 to 50 range as 90 will be a bit long for most landscape images.
My .02,
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I think Autostitch might have a memory leak problem. After multiple uses, I got an "out of memory" failure when stitching small JPG's. Restarting the program fixed that.
As for stitching multiple 90MB images, Jeez, that's pretty stressful for a freebie program. My Jurassic 1.3GHz Athlon fairly staggers with the workload at 5MB source files.
What amazes me is how well it stitches difficult data. I never use a tripod, shoot material with lots of straight lines, including interiors at close range. It's rarely failed.
What few artifacts it produces are easily fixed. Double images at overlap seams are sometimes difficult to see at first, especially in foliage.
If it goes commercial, I'm buying.
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.....erh! I see what you mean. $3000 US dollars is a bit steep for me. Jack, you're out of my league. I'm part of that brigade with champagne taste but a beer budget :D .
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My favourite stitching program has always been Panavue's image Assembler. Whenever I've tried other stitching programs, they've either proved to be not as good, or if better, more cumbersome and definitely more time consuming (I'm thinking of expensive programs like the no longer available PowerStitch, or free programs like PTAssembler).
I'm trying to reduce the amount of time I spend sitting in front of a monitor, not increase it, so I have not tried PTAssembler. I have little doubt it can correct for perspective anomalies which IA might be unable to handle. However, for such situations I'll use my tilt & shift lenses, so for me, if I've chosen the right lens, there's not much that IA cannot successfully stitch.
Nevertheless, I was always disappointed that IA had a problem producing resulting files larger than 400MB (with Win98 it was only 250MB). There was also the problem of no 16 bit stitching.
Well, that's no longer a problem. Image Assembler version 3 comes in 3 flavours; Standard, Professional and Enterprise. The more expensive Professional and Enterprise editions stitch in 16 bit mode, support ICC profiles and image sizes up to 100,000 x 100,000 pixels.
If my maths is correct, that's 10,000 megapixels x 3 = 30 gigabyte files sizes in 8 bit and 60 gigabyte in 16 bit. This should be large enough for most purposes :D .
There are no doubt other refinements in version 3. Previous versions were a bit lacking in the precision of the fully automated stitching option. One could try it, with little time wasted, but more often than not the results were not flawless.
First impressions are, the new version has improved upon the precision of automatic blending. I just loaded into the program a mosaic of 4 images which were in numerical order. All I had to do was specifiy that the resulting image would consist of 2 rows and 2 columns before loading, then hit 'run' and stand back. Within a couple of minutes I had a perfect stitch.
This program is so good, if I owned a Mac I'd be tempted to sell it and buy a PC :D .
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I used to use this program, but it became too limiting, so I switched to PT Gui. Is there anything the new Panavue Image Assembler can do that PT Gui cannot?
Quentin
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Jack, becuase I knew you used Realviz Stitcher, I gave it a try (albeit in demo mode). The seams were not so good, whereas those from PTAssembler in its Autocreate mode were undetectable to my novice eyes. This made me bite the bullet and begin on the Panorma Tools learning curve. For this, I have found John Houghton's tutorial Panaorma Tools - Using the Optimzer (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/j.houghton/optitute.htm) a rosetta stone.
Dan
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As for stitching multiple 90MB images, Jeez, that's pretty stressful for a freebie program.
Actually, I reduced them all to 4MB. The problem I'm having is that Autostitch doesn't seem to be able to deliver a 13 image stitch in a row. I have now succeeded by making 3x5 image stitches and then stitching the 3 groups of five. I've got a result that's very similar to what IA can produce and I'm therefore impressed considering this is a free program.
However, IA does appear to have significant advantages.
(1) Handles TIF and 16 bit images.
(2) Faster than Autostitch.
(3) Better capability to automatically pull a row of images in line despite the the fact the camera might not have been perfectly level, which results in a stepping effect with Autostitch and previous versions of IA.
(4) More seamless skies, which are very prone to revealing slight changes of hue. Autostitch is good but not quite as good as IA in this respect.
I'm sure there are some areas in which Autostitch excels. One that comes to mind is its ability to automatically recognise any image's position in the jigsaw. With Image Assembler, one has to specify the number of rows and columns and get the images in the right order.
As I mentioned before, each stitching program has its strengths and weaknesses. I'll experiment some more with Autostitch. If it can do something which IA can't, or at least do something more quickly, more accurately or more easily, then I'll use it.
The 'out of memory' message seems to be due to setting the system memory too high. 2Gb is worse than 1Gb ???
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Sorry! I wasn't clear.
Apparently, I wasn't either.
I converted the 16 bit 92MB images to 8 bit, reduced the file size to 4MB and saved in jpeg.
Yes, but file size has very little to do with how the image is represented in memory, as long as the image resolution is the same. You have to stop thinking of them as files. Think of them as e.g. 6000x4000 resolution images.
So if Autostitch doesn't do anything really clever, it probably loads all images into memory as 8-bit images at whatever resolution you're using.
Naively, a 22 Mpx RGB image in 8-bit mode takes 66 MB of memory, while in 16-bit, it takes 132 MB. Even if you compress the file to 2 bytes, it still has to expand it to a 22 Mpx image if it wants to keep everything in memory.
Then there is some additional memory overhead while it manipulates the images.
If we take your example with a 92 MB 16-bit TIFF RGB files, these would naively be 46 MB in 8-bit mode. 13 times 46 MB equals 598 MB, which is the bare minimum needed to keep just these images in memory without "cheating". If the program isn't cleverly written, it may actually keep not only the non-stitched images as well as the result in memory at the same time, but also the already-stitched image sources. So, at 6 images successfully stitched (276 MB) you would then possibly be using 276 + 598 = 874 MB of memory just on that.
In 16-bit mode, you'd try to use double that amount.
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Suffice it to say, I now carry the following as my main lenses for landscape photography:
Olympus 24 shift
Olympus 35 shift
Mamiya 50mm shift
Canon 90 TSE
Jack, ever since your Digital Outback article I have been considering using your approach. Do you have a recommendation on a TS lens to start with for landscapes with on a Canon D10, given its smaller sensor size to your Canon 1Ds?
Dan
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Would you mind elaborating a bit more on what you saw with the 3 lenses below on your 1DsMK2?
The 28 and 35 Nikkors perform very well within their range -- I would rank them on par or slightly above the Canon 45 TSE. Both fall off significantly at about 8~9mm shift on the horizontal, though in fairness to Nikon that is where they claim maximum shift is. You can get the full 11mm on vertical.
The Schneider/Leica 28 super angualon PC. I had high hopes for this lens, but was disappointed -- at least in the sample I tested. It was a very sharp lens un-shifted, but even just a few mm of shift and the image was degrading significantly. In the end, it was not really as usable as the 35 Nikkor and overall the 28 Nikkor offers significanly more shift. I will reiterate I only tested one sample of this lens so it could have been a bad copy and not indicative of this lens' performance in general.
Nikkor 85PC. This lens offers essentially the same performance as the Canon 90TSE. If you want the entire nit-pic, the Canon is barely sharper in the center, however the Nikkor stays consistent all the way to the corner and at the corner it shows barely sharper than the Canon. I called it a wash. If you already own the Nikkor, I'd say use it. OTOH, the Canon does AE and allows focus confirmation on Canon EOS cameras where the Nikkor does not.
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Thanks for the info Ray!
Regards,
Bernard
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Anybody else using Realviz stitcher? I find it does an incredible job, though is slow if you use the layered and masked psd output mode.
The tiff mode runs fast and leaves un-decetable seams about 90% of the time so I generally run it first. If I get an image with a visible seam, I then run it in psd mode so I can edit the blend masks myself.
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Jack,
By flat stitches, I take it you mean mosaics (or single rows) of 4, 8, 16 or 20 35mm images which end up looking like an ultra sharp 4x5 image (or 8x10 image) taken with a super lens impossible to build, rather than the whiz bang 360 degree QTVR panoramic effects.
That's what I'm interested in; exceeding the resolution limits of large format photography using small format cameras.
Image Assembler is very efficient at producing such images.
That's exactly what I mean by "flat." The only reason I stitich at all is to get more effective MP resolution for larger prints.
As an aside, this is the precise reason my main imaging lenses are shift lenses -- it is very easy to generate an almost perfect image overlap for later stitching, and by going flat, you have virtually none of the curved perspective distortions you get with sperical (panned or gimball-head) stitches or swing-lens cameras.
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However, in some respects Autostitch is quite abysmal. There's no stitch so bad as no stitch at all. Despite setting system memory to the maximum 2GB in Autostitch's options and increasing pixel width and height, I frequently got 'out of memory' messages. I found it impossible to stitch 13 images in a single row, even after I'd reduced the image size from 16 bit 92MB tifs to 8 bit 4 MB jpegs.
If you think about it, it's hardly surprising. "JPEG" and "TIFF" only help you when you store things to disk. The images are still X times Y pixels, aren't they? By going from 16-bit TIFF-RGB to 8-bit whatever, you've only saved half the effective memory space. Depending on implementation, you may not even save that much.
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The bracket slides sideways in the tripod head QR release plate.
Here you can see an article where I marked the L-bracket at 11mm intervals for use with the Canon TSE lenses under full shift -- scroll about half way through. The article explains in detail how to do the shift/counter-shift:
http://www.outbackphoto.com/workflow/wf_58/essay.html (http://www.outbackphoto.com/workflow/wf_58/essay.html)
You start with the camera full right and the lens full left. Then move the lens right and camera left by 11mm and take shot two, 11mm more and take the last shot.
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What's the arrangement for the Olympus 24mm shift? Do you need an adapter for the Canon mount?
Yes. I use the Cameraquest adapters. I find them to be of very high quality, though the service I've experienced is variable.
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This program is so good, if I owned a Mac I'd be tempted to sell it and buy a PC .
Don't worry, if you had a Mac, you wouldn't.
Thanks for the recommendation - maybe worth a look as fixing panoramics isn't as simple as some people make out ...
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Bernard,
It's all right. You were clear enough. It's just I'm on a slow computer. I haven't bought the program yet because I haven't got the details of my previous purchase at hand in order to get a discount, and I can only save images in grey scale with the trial version.
I'm puzzled why the program won't import PSD files now I've changed the PS file preference settings to maximum compatibility. However, I can save a resulting image in multi-layered PSD format which gives me a layer for each individual image that was stitched and a mask in 'channels' that allows some degree of editing of each stitched image separately. However, I'm not sure of the usefulness of this. I generally find that getting the color balance and levels of each image reasonably close before stitching results in a perfect blend of hues; no abrupt demarkation line in skies, for example, which many stitching programs often produce. (Photoshop's photomerge is notorious for this).
The only problem that still remains, even with this improved version of IA, is the perennial proplem of parallax errors. I have yet to see how much this problem has been overcome in difficult images I previously failed to stitch, but I would expect at least some degree of improvement.
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Is there anything the new Panavue Image Assembler can do that PT Gui cannot?
Probably not, except save you heaps of time. I should try PTGui but I'm put off by the difficulty of this program that everyone seems to admit.
As a speed experiment, I've just timed how long it takes on my new computer to load and stitch 13 x 92.6MB 16 bit images, which result in a file size of 1.1GB. (These are 35mm negatives scanned at 3500 dpi).
The total time from the loading of the first image till the final stitched image appeared on the screen, including time spent on the 'find camera position automatically' option, which appears to be a substitute for 'lens definition', was 16 minutes. Yes, that's sixteen. Sixteen minutes to stitch a 1.1GB image. And what's even more remarkable, the stitch is flawless.
However, I admit that this was an easy stitch because there's nothing in the near foreground to cause serious parallax errors. It's a scene of an escarpment, waterfall, rainforest and coastline.
An interesting new feature of IA is the ability to save a stitched image in multi-layer PSD format to manipulate each individual image in PS later, if things did not work out quite right. This sounds to me like something to be avoided. Better to get the stitch right in the first instance, but for those advanced Photoshop users (I don't consider myself advanced) this feature might prove to be very useful. However, it seems Photoshop 3 PSD has a serious file size limitation. My 1 GB image is too big to save in multi-layer PSD. Following is an extract from Panavue's site on this feature.
The Professional Edition of ImageAssembler allows you to save your resulting images as multi-layer PSD files. This allows you to do post-production retouching in Photoshop. When you open a multi-layer PSD resulting image in Photoshop, you see each source image as a separate layer. In each of these layers, the blending is saved as a mask. You may use all of the Photoshop tools to modify the colors of any of the images, to move one image with respect to another, or to change the stitch line or blending width. Probably the most useful feature is the ability to modify the stitch lines or the blending widths by working on the masks. You may make a mask visible, then add to it with the pencil or the brush tool, or remove from it with the eraser tool. Photoshop's rich set of features allows for unlimited control of the blending.
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I use Autopano with PT Gui and this saves some time, but the main stitch is a little time consuming. Still, PT Gui has provided me with the best stitched panoramas of all so far. I may try the trial version of Panavue Image Assembler as I am entitled to a discount as a version 2 registered user.
Quentin
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But, hey! Why should I be plugging Image Assembler? What have they done for me, except provide a good program? When I first had probelems (years ago) with stitched images not opening in Photoshop and I sent Panavue's technical support a message, they replied 'contact Photoshop'. Didn't they know there was a 30,000 pixel limit in Photoshop, or were they just being very diplomatic?
When I later quizzed them about ultimate file sizes that IA could produce, they were very vague. Now they've specified it clearly in terms of pixels and file formats. The program has just got professional.
It remains to be seen whether their support is professional. I'm still waiting for a reply to my email requesting information on the original email address I used to download their product many years ago, in order to get my discount on this major upgrade. For some reason, the serial number and digital code (which of course I recorded) are not sufficient. They want the email address I was using at the time of download. I guess they're paranoid about piracy.
Okay, Panavue! Be paranoid if you like. Just respond to my email promptly, please!
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As an aside, this is the precise reason my main imaging lenses are shift lenses -- it is very easy to generate an almost perfect image overlap for later stitching, and by going flat, you have virtually none of the curved perspective distortions you get with sperical (panned or gimball-head) stitches or swing-lens cameras.
Almost is the key word. I have a series of test images, taken indoors with the TS-E 90mm plus 1.4x converter and 20D, of book shelves and sloping roof beams. There's a good mixture of horizontals, diagonals and verticals.
I was disappointed the previous version of IA could not do a flawless stitch. It was very close, in fact really close enough. A small amount of cloning easily fixed the problem, but it wasn't perfect and I felt it should have been because the parallax errors were not great. Through judicious cropping and minimum overlap, I was able to eventually get a flawless stitch. It just required some work.
I've tried version 3 with the same series of uncropped images. The results in fully automatic mode were as good as the previous version of IA using flags. However, this new version of IA has an option to use up to 8 flags per image. Using 5 pairs of flags per join, I was able to get a flawless stitch.
The resulting image is over 80MB in 8 bit.
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If you think about it, it's hardly surprising. "JPEG" and "TIFF" only help you when you store things to disk. The images are still X times Y pixels, aren't they? By going from 16-bit TIFF-RGB to 8-bit whatever, you've only saved half the effective memory space. Depending on implementation, you may not even save that much.
Sorry! I wasn't clear. I converted the 16 bit 92MB images to 8 bit, reduced the file size to 4MB and saved in jpeg. Autostitch was still not able to stitch all 13 images. It stitched just the last 6, but did a good job on those 6.
Could be the overlap between images no. 7 and 8 is insufficient for the automatic process. I tried stitching a row of 8 images converted from 20D RAW images and saved in jpeg. Autostitch was able to handle this, but for some reason was not able to to pull the images into a straight line. I got something with more distortion than a fish-eye lens, despite ticking the 'auto straighten' option.
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To clarify, with my flat-stitch method -- shifting the lens and counter-shifting the camera -- you get ZERO parallax
Yes. You mentioned this before and it certainly makes sense to me, but you need a special tripod head or bracket for that, don't you? My concern would be lost opportunities whilst stuffing around. As in auto exposure bracketing, one doesn't want to waste any time between shots.
Now it would be great if Canon would produce a motorised TS-E lens and sliding tripod head so all these movements could be co-ordinated :D .
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I have an RRS L-bracket on my camera with hash marks to index the camera shifts.
I can't quite visualise this. I understand the purpose of the RRS L bracket is to allow easy rotation of the camera from horizontal to vertical position whilst maintaining the weight over the centre of the tripod and keeping the perspective the same. Are you saying that the bracket slides sideways, or that the camera slides sideways in the bracket?
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Has anyone tried the same with one of the shift lenses available in Nikon mount?
Regards,
Bernard
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$3000 US dollars is a bit steep for me.
I assume you are referring to the going rate for an Olympus 24 shift?
Yes, they are expensive. I believe there is one on eBay now with a starting bid of $2800. I know one sold recently on FM for $2400.
But they are also very rare and thus highly desireable to Olympus collectors. I have read but never confirmed that less than 100 of these lenses were ever produced. I also heard they were individually hand-assembled and callibrated, and that the retail price in the early 90's was around $4,000 US.
Notwithstanding, it is a joy to use on the 1Ds2. Not perfect as it does show some minor CA, but so far it is the best thing going in a wideangle shift.
Cheers,
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2) ALL the Canon TSE's will accept either Canon converter.
Jack,
You're right! The TS-E 24mm does accept the Canon 1.4x extender. I never even thought of trying it when I discovered this lens was hardly better than my Sigma 15-30 at 24mm (it was actually marginally sharper and I beleive I have a good copy of the Sigma).
What's the arrangement for the Olympus 24mm shift? Do you need an adapter for the Canon mount?
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Ray,
I downloaded the trial version, and gave it a try on 6 carefully shot D2X images in vertical mode.
The resulting 10000 pixels wide image is nice, with very few stiching marks visible. Impressive.
However, I was a bit disapointed by the .psd layered export function. I was expecting to be able to retouch in .psd the final image produced by editing masks... but this doesn't seem to work too well.
- Have you ever used this capabilty?
- Is the current v3 behaviour a bug, or was it working like this before?
I'll probably contact the company on this, as it seems important to be able to re-touch the result.
Thank you in advance for any feedback you might have on this.
Regards,
Bernard
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Jack,
By flat stitches, I take it you mean mosaics (or single rows) of 4, 8, 16 or 20 35mm images which end up looking like an ultra sharp 4x5 image (or 8x10 image) taken with a super lens impossible to build, rather than the whiz bang 360 degree QTVR panoramic effects.
That's what I'm interested in; exceeding the resolution limits of large format photography using small format cameras.
Image Assembler is very efficient at producing such images.
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For getting more megapixels from your camera, nothing beats Autostitch, pricewise. It's free!
I don't do 360's, I don't stitch rows of stitches and I don't use a tripod. I find the quality amazing and I've been stitching for years.
Lack of control and filetype flexiblity are problematic at present, hopefully this will improve if the software goes commercial.
I certainly agree about Autostitch. Despite the interface shortcomings of the present free version - it does extraordinarily accurate stitches. I will be very interested to see how this software develops.
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My first TS-E lens was the 90mm simply because it's the sharpest in Canon's range, but I have to admit it's not the most useful focal length for landscapes. I now use my TS-E 24 much more, which is in fact a 38mm on the 20D. It's a pity this lens is a bit on the soft side.
By the way, the TS-E 90 accepts an extender. With 1.4x extender and camera vertical, it's necessary to take 4 images for overlap, resulting in a file size more than 3x larger than a single shot using a 1.6 crop camera. The 90mm is good enough to deliver a slight increase in picture resolution (as opposed to lp/mm resolution) through use of the 1.4x extender, but of course it's then no longer a fine quality prime but a medium quality zoom at around 126mm. I did a comparisom some time ago and found the TS-E 90 with 1.4x extender was almost as good as my 28-135 IS zoom at 126mm :D .
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The bracket slides sideways in the tripod head QR release plate.
Thanks for that. Interesting article. I guess I'll have to import this L bracket from the US. I anticipate problems getting it to fit my existing tripods ???
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The 28 and 35 Nikkors perform very well within their range -- I would rank them on par or slightly above the Canon 45 TSE. Both fall off significantly at about 8~9mm shift on the horizontal, though in fairness to Nikon that is where they claim maximum shift is. You can get the full 11mm on vertical.
Jack,
Thanks a lot for your kind help. I'll probably get a second hand 28 mm Nikkor. Will keep you posted on the results.
Cheers,
Bernard
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Bernard,
I've been away from my studio and computer gear for the past few days and haven't given V3 a full trial. This claimed support of PSD layers is a new feature. The first images I attempted to stitch were in PSD format and IA couldn't open them (invalid bits/pixel message), which I thought was a bit odd, but redeading the list of features it appears that IA support for PSD is only Photoshop 3 *PSD. I just assumed that this was the cause of the problem. I hadn't set PS preferences to maximise PSD compatibility.
Generally, I use TIFF for stitching. With previous versions of IA I was often up against Photoshop's 30,000 pixel limit and had to edit the image in Corel's PhotoPaint. With PS CS the limit is much extended, but for long panoramas Image Assembler's limit then became the annoying factor. These file size limits, for all practical purposes, have now been abolished in both PS and IA, and for me that's a big step forward. 16 bit stitching is icing on the cake.
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Maybe it's because I only do flat stitches and hence only use that mode on Realviz...
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I certainly agree about Autostitch. Despite the interface shortcomings of the present free version - it does extraordinarily accurate stitches. I will be very interested to see how this software develops.
I've just tried Autostitch and I see what you mean. It can do remarkably accurate stitches. I tried it with the 4 TS-E images which Image Assembler V3 has a slight problem with in fully automatic mode. I had to use flags. Autostitch did the same flawless job without flags, so credit where it's due. I'll experiment further to see where the limits are regarding parallax errors.
However, in some respects Autostitch is quite abysmal. There's no stitch so bad as no stitch at all. Despite setting system memory to the maximum 2GB in Autostitch's options and increasing pixel width and height, I frequently got 'out of memory' messages. I found it impossible to stitch 13 images in a single row, even after I'd reduced the image size from 16 bit 92MB tifs to 8 bit 4 MB jpegs.
Without ticking the 'gain compensation' box (default unticked), the few images of that 13 image series I was able to stitch had obvious differences in hue and levels amongst the images in the final stitch. After ticking 'gain compensation' and increasing 'gain sigma' from 0.1 to 0.3, it took about 45 minutes to stitch just 2 images. At least there was a progress window, "rendering block 7 of 320; blending block 8 of 320 etc etc".
I get the impression that Autostitch could be ideal for owners of P&S cameras who shoot in jpeg mode. I'll experiment some more with this. I'd be interested to see how long it takes to stitch that 61 image mosaic featured on Autostitch's web site.
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Yes, but file size has very little to do with how the image is represented in memory, as long as the image resolution is the same. You have to stop thinking of them as files. Think of them as e.g. 6000x4000 resolution images.
Of course. The reason I've been converting images to jpeg is not to reduce file sizes or resolution but simply because Autostitch only accepts images in this format. I'm trying to find out if Autostitch can do anything that Image Assembler cannot.
My impressions so far are that Autostitch cannot handle large files (ie. high resolution images); needs a more substantial overlap between images to work at all, and sometimes has difficulty straightening out images.
Its inability to work with TIF and 16 bit images is clearly a disadvantage, but a perfect stitch in jpeg is probably better than an imperfect stitch in 16 bit TIF, so this is what I'm looking for.
Stitching programs can be great time wasters. To reduce wasted time, it's necessary to know the limitations of the program.
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It's a pity this lens is a bit on the soft side.
By the way, the TS-E 90 accepts an extender.
1) That's why I use the Olympus 24 shift on my Canon ;~)
2) ALL the Canon TSE's will accept either Canon converter.
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Ray,
Thanks for the answer. I was probably not clear enough, sorry.
My question was more about the .psd export, than import. Meaning the possibility to export the stiched image in .psd in order to be able to edit manually the masks used for stiching.
Best regards,
Bernard
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Everybody else is saying great things about it, but I just could never manage to get good results out of it, probably as a result of me not devoting enough time to learn to master it.
Yea, my attempts with the Realviz trial version were not encouraging. There's is probably no clear winner here. Each program will have its strengths and weaknesses but to fully evaluate any program and find out what it's really capable of requires a lot of time and experimentation. I'm not prepared to spend that time.
One gets used to a particular interface. An unfamiliar way of doing things can so easily be seen as inherently awkward and cumbersome; a bit like a Mac owner switching to a PC for the first time, or vice versa :D .
Whenever I've tried other stitching programs which might seem to be more powerfull than IA, or are claimed to be, I've always got the impression of great awkwardness in the method of execution; for example, trying to align a semi transparent overlap and peering at the screen to see if one image needs a little bit more rotation for a perfect alignment when it's difficult to be sure if it's perfectly aligned or not.
What I like about Image Assembler, apart from its very good fully automatic processes, is the easy way one can bring up consecutive pairs of images on the screen and zoom in on just the area where a particular pair of flags are, having positioned them approximately first. It's even possible to place the flags on two matching individual pixels if that's the degree of accuracy that's required.
I also like the way IA can force or align stitched images in a row (if you ticked the box in the 'options' window). Some stitching programs give a resulting image with great bulbous circular edges which have to be cropped, thus wasting up to a third of the image. The new version of IA has improved upon this feature. The 13 images of my 1.1GB stitch referred to earlier were taken about 6 years ago. The camera was not perfectly level and after stitching reduced size scans using the earlier version of IA, there was an unavoidable stepping effect at the top and bottom of the panorama, each image from left to right being a step lower than the previous one. Cropping the final stitch to a rectangle for printing resulted in some waste, maybe 10 or 20% depending on how much additional sky I cloned in. This new version of IA succeeded in forcing all the images into an almost perfect rectangle. Instead of significant stepping, there's just a slight raggedness of the edge in a few places requiring very minimal cropping.
I'm very pleased with this new version. It's a significant upgrade.
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For getting more megapixels from your camera, nothing beats Autostitch, pricewise. It's free!
I don't do 360's, I don't stitch rows of stitches and I don't use a tripod. I find the quality amazing and I've been stitching for years.
Lack of control and filetype flexiblity are problematic at present, hopefully this will improve if the software goes commercial.
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Almost is the key word.
When I say "almost" I mean I cannot find the seams at actual pixel view even though I know where to look for them. Anything less, and I'll edit the image to fix it to where I cannot detect seams.
To clarify, with my flat-stitch method -- shifting the lens and counter-shifting the camera -- you get ZERO parallax because you are working fully inside the lens' base image circle, so even lens distortions will not affect the final image seam since they'll line up perfectly. Any visible mis-matches I get mean I either did not do a perfect counter-shift or there is an exposure or color-balance difference along a seam.
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Has anyone tried the same with one of the shift lenses available in Nikon mount?
Regards,
Bernard
I have tested the following shift lenses on my Canon 1Ds2:
Nikon 35 and 28 PC (latest versions only)
Nikon 85 tilt/shift macro
Olympus 24 and 35 shift
Contax/Zeiss 35 PC
Schneider (Leica) 28 PC
Mamiya 645 50mm Shift
Hartblei 80mm super-rotator
Suffice it to say, I now carry the following as my main lenses for landscape photography:
Olympus 24 shift
Olympus 35 shift
Mamiya 50mm shift
Canon 90 TSE
Cheers,
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Nikon 35 and 28 PC (latest versions only)
Nikon 85 tilt/shift macro
Schneider (Leica) 28 PC
Jack,
Thanks for your kinf feedback. Would you mind elaborating a bit more on what you saw with the 3 lenses below on your 1DsMK2?
Thank you in advance,
Regards,
Bernard