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Author Topic: PTgui or Autopano software? what's your favorite?  (Read 12979 times)

bellimages

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PTgui or Autopano software? what's your favorite?
« on: August 09, 2010, 03:18:56 pm »

Would like to see a show of hands for these two software programs. Pros and Cons
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BernardLanguillier

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PTgui or Autopano software? what's your favorite?
« Reply #1 on: August 09, 2010, 06:34:47 pm »

Quote from: bellimages
Would like to see a show of hands for these two software programs. Pros and Cons

Autopano
- best automatic detection
- best automatic horizon leveling
- best long term platform

PT gui
- best image quality (less stitching errors and slightly better blending with 8.3.10 vs 2.07)
- best image geometry control
- best fusion HDR

Cheers,
Bernard

Justan

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Re: PTgui or Autopano software? what's your favorite?
« Reply #2 on: August 11, 2010, 11:19:30 pm »

I did a comparison of the two several months back. I had an 11 frame stitch done in very low light that I used to evaluate. Photoshop couldn’t do it. I found that ptgui produced excellent results and I liked the UI more so went with it. I've done several dozen panos since and it’s never failed to produce excellent results. It is very fast and offers about a dozen different projections. One of my favorites is called vedutismo.

usathyan

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Re: PTgui or Autopano software? what's your favorite?
« Reply #3 on: August 12, 2010, 10:09:56 am »

I like PTGui for its HDR merging option...saves time...
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fike

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Re: PTgui or Autopano software? what's your favorite?
« Reply #4 on: August 12, 2010, 10:30:07 am »

I have been using PTGui for a couple years.  Very easy program.  I was using PTAssembler before that, and it required substantially more manual intervention and more knowledge of the processing involved in making a pano. I don't have any experience with AutoPano.
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JeffKohn

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Re: PTgui or Autopano software? what's your favorite?
« Reply #5 on: August 12, 2010, 11:26:49 am »

My thoughts are similar to Bernard's. Autopano Pro's automatic detection is pretty amazing, and it seems to do a better job of finding the vanishing point when the camera was tilted up or down (in fact sometimes even when I'm going to be using PTGui for the stitch, I'll run Autopano Pro's detection to see where it thinks the vanishing point is).

PTGui gives you a little more control, with it's manual control point editor and the ability to override image parameters such as shift. PTGui also has two features I really like: Exposure Fusion blending for bracketed shots and the Vedutismo projection.

For panos where I don't need exposure blending and I'm going to use one of the projections that Autopano Pro supports, that will be the stitcher I use more often than not. For stitches where I need  exposure blending, precise control of image parameters (eg shift), or want to use the Vedutismo projection, PTGui is the one I turn to. If I were to choose a single stitcher it would be PTGui.
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Luis Argerich

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Re: PTgui or Autopano software? what's your favorite?
« Reply #6 on: August 12, 2010, 12:52:23 pm »

I tried so many pano programs :)
PtGUI, Hugin and PtAssembler are the best ones to me.

PtAssembler is probably the most complete package and the one that gives you more control. The camera position optimization is great, the number of special projections, the ability to do both exposure and focus stacking, etc.

Hugin is free and works really well, I like the ability to remove control points from the sky automatically (Celeste)

PtGUI is great at stitching and placing control points, very fast and very nice quality in the final image.

After evaluating autopano I couldn't find anything were AP was better than the other 3.

feppe

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Re: PTgui or Autopano software? what's your favorite?
« Reply #7 on: August 12, 2010, 12:57:10 pm »

My main gripes with PTGUI is that it only accepts properly bracketed shots, and they have to be the same aperture and shutter speed in each bracket. With APP you can give it any bracket combination you want, and it will blend them nicely. Hell, you can throw auto-exposures at it, or horizontal and vertical photos, or even different focal lengths, and it'll do just fine! It truly is autopano.

I've played with PTGUI's exposure fusion and it's pretty poor as you only have global adjustments. I much prefer manual blending of bracketed layers and the control it allows - but PTGUI does a very good job of creating matching layers based on exposure, something which APP often struggles with.

So unfortunately I've come to the conclusion that I need both. PTGUI works most of the time, and is better overall, but APP often comes to the rescue on tough shots.

OldRoy

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Re: PTgui or Autopano software? what's your favorite?
« Reply #8 on: August 12, 2010, 01:13:01 pm »

Having never used AP my comments are worthless. Not deterred, here we go.

I've used PTGuiPro for a couple of years and find it excellent although my use is predominantly restricted to stitching 180x360 VR panos. FWIW I have never liked the HDR function, much preferring to pre-process the files though Enfuse/EnfuseGUI and then stitch/blend in PTGui. The blending code in the program is so good that I've not found it necessary to use Enblend or Smartblend for a long time. I found the learning curve on this program a bit steep at first but got a lot of very good help on the Panoguide forums, which I'd recommend to anyone beginning to learn the program.

I'd be interested to know why Bernard thinks AP is a better long-term bet, unless that would involve treading on anyone's toes (although if you're in business you should wear steel-toe boots...)

Roy
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JeffKohn

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Re: PTgui or Autopano software? what's your favorite?
« Reply #9 on: August 12, 2010, 05:55:32 pm »

Quote
PTGUI does a very good job of creating matching layers based on exposure, something which APP often struggles with.
What I like about PTGui is that I can have it generate the enfused pano, along with panos for each exposure of the bracket set, all created with the exact same control points. Then I can blend those any way I want to get the final result.
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BernardLanguillier

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Re: PTgui or Autopano software? what's your favorite?
« Reply #10 on: August 13, 2010, 12:00:54 am »

I'd be interested to know why Bernard thinks AP is a better long-term bet, unless that would involve treading on anyone's toes (although if you're in business you should wear steel-toe boots...)

Well, the Beta of PTgui Pro 9.0 sort of changes all that, but until now Autopano appeared to have invested more in a 64 bits/multi-core/GPU enabled platform.

Now they have a major problem in terms of developement speed. It seems that they are pretty close now with the Alpha of 2.5, but I guess it will takes several more months until we reach a level of stability/functional coverage sufficient to make it a true comprehensive solution. As of now 1.4.2 is still probably the best release of Autopano Pro ever and that is more than one year old, but it is real slow.

Cheers,
Bernard

KenS

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Re: PTgui or Autopano software? what's your favorite?
« Reply #11 on: August 13, 2010, 10:52:39 am »

I am interested in landscape images with high resolution and large depth of field.  An approach is to shoot two rows using a pano head ( e.g. Nodal Ninja 5/RD16, vs. 'flat stitching') with a lens focal length of something like 50 to 100 mm (full frame 35 mm camera).  To achieve foreground sharpness focus stacking/blending of multiple focus-point-varied shots are used in the bottom row (to mitigate the shallower DOF from these longer focal lengths)

See example:
http://www.tawbaware.com/ptasmblr_help_stack_example.htm

How does PTAssembler  'stack up' (errr, compare  :) )  against PTgui or AutoPano for this technique?

or,  would it be preferable to first focus blend the multiple different focus-point stacked images using something like Helicon Focus or Zerene Stacker and then combine those bottom row images with the top row using PTgui, Autopano, or something else?

 

BernardLanguillier

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Re: PTgui or Autopano software? what's your favorite?
« Reply #12 on: August 13, 2010, 10:21:37 pm »

or,  would it be preferable to first focus blend the multiple different focus-point stacked images using something like Helicon Focus or Zerene Stacker and then combine those bottom row images with the top row using PTgui, Autopano, or something else?

It depends on the relationship between focal lenght, aperture,...

Overall I have had better and more dramatic results with the focus blend first then stitch approach.

Cheers,
Bernard

Ray

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Re: PTgui or Autopano software? what's your favorite?
« Reply #13 on: August 15, 2010, 08:58:29 pm »

Would like to see a show of hands for these two software programs. Pros and Cons

I tend to prefer Autopano Pro for its excellent automatic results which often save time. I first started using Autopano around the time Photoshop produced its much improved Photomerge feature in CS3.

Nevertheless, I found then, as I find now, that Photoshop's Photomerge can sometimes do a successful automatic stitch, with certain types of images, when Autopano falls flat on its face. In such circumstances, I guess PTgui could also do a successful stitch, but why mess around if one can find a program that stitches automatically?

Photomerege in CS5 seems to have been improved yet again. The following two shots, taken with the Nikkor 14-24 at 24mm, were handheld. I was surprised to find that Autopano just couldn't handle these images and produced a completely unusable result, whereas Photomerge produced a seamless stitch (that is, no discontinuities) automatically.

PS. Have failed to include the images in this post. Must be teething problems of the new software. The 'Additional Options..' tells me
Quote
Maximum attachment size allowed: 1024 KB, per post: 4


I interpret this as meaning each attachment should not exceed 1024KB in its compressed jpeg format, and that a maximum of 4 attachments, each up to 1024KB in size, is allowed.

Having attempted to post 4 attachments, each well under 1MB in size, I got the following error message:  "An Error Has Occurred! Your file is too large. The maximum attachment size allowed is 2048 KB."
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Ray

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Re: PTgui or Autopano software? what's your favorite?
« Reply #14 on: August 17, 2010, 09:20:56 pm »

Let's try again with just two images, the Autopano stitch followed by the CS5 stitch after perspective correction, stretching and cropping.

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Ray

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Re: PTgui or Autopano software? what's your favorite?
« Reply #15 on: August 17, 2010, 10:00:15 pm »

Okay! That worked. Let's try another 3 images. I suspect the attachment rules are, (1) a maximum of 1024KB for any individual attachment, (2) a maximum of 4 attachments, (3) a total size for all 4 attachment no greater than 2048KB.

The first 2 images are the frames that were stitched, showing plenty of everlap. The third image is the result that CS5 Photomerge produced automatically. Free Transform and Distort easily fixed that.

Sometimes, with hand-held shots, I find it necessary to use 'free transform' and 'distort' on individual frames prior to stitching. Sometimes, particularly with more than one row of images, it's necessary to do a progressive stitch, ie. stitch together the first two images, one from each row, then the second two image from each row, then the third and so on. With two rows of 3 images, one then has just 3 images to contend with. These of course need to be cropped before stitching again, so one should always try to allow for a good overlap when taking the shots.

Sometimes it still doesn't work, and one might have to stitch together the first and second pair, then the 2nd and 3rd pair, crop again, and finally stitch together the two final images consisting of the 1st and 2nd pair, and the 2nd and 3rd pair. Whatever works.

Of course it would be better to avoid such hassles by using a tripod and pano head in the first instance. But sometimes that's just not possible, or may be simply too inconvenient. The ability of software such as CS5 to seamlessly and automatically stitch hand-held shots of close subjects is a huge advance on early stitching programs.
« Last Edit: August 17, 2010, 10:02:45 pm by Ray »
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