great tool for pano shots: "enblend"

[didger]

[font color=\'#000000\']This has been available for quite some time as a beta version.  I have PTMac and the Mac blending program is called Xblend, but it's the same thing.

For both PTMac and PTAssembler, the bits and pieces now exist to create virtually perfect stitched images, no matter what kinds of lenses you use and even if the edges have somewhat mismatching color balance or exposure.

I've tried numerous panorama programs and have only gotten consistently perfect stitches and blending with PTMac.  PTAssembler is basically the same thing, so I assume it works just as well.

The problem with both PTMac and PTAssembler is that the interface is very cumbersome, preview capability is very limited and crude, and there's no convenient way to specify the pixel dimensions you want for the final render.  There's also essentially no 16 bit file implementation.  Once these programs get fully integrated and a good streamlined interface, they'll be phenomenally powerful production tools.  Right now they're rather clumsy tools for experimenters with lots of time to produce a few pictures, alas.  I'm accumulating an awful lot of great (I think) stitching source images, but I don't want to spend a lot of time with not really quite there yet stitching programs.[/font]

[Edward]

[font color=\'#000000\']I just found that PTGui also lets you automatically use enblend as a plugin.  There is another plugin, Autopano, that automatically generates the control points - anyone tried it?[/font]

[drew]

[font color=\'#000000\']autopano:
Initially, I just could not get this to work with PTAssembler. I was going to email the author (yes, you can), but rather than bother him, first I checked through the instructions and checked my own version of PTA,..2.3
Then I upgraded PTA (at no cost) to 2.42 and autopano worked beautifully. No more manually selecting control points. The plugin will even find suitable overlapping images in a folder which contains a mixture of images.
Highly recommended.
enblend:
This worked even with the old version of PTA. It works a treat. Suffice it to say (without reentering the pulpit), that it works so well that it negates the need to output finished files as psds in layers with layer masks. No more fiddly fixing of tonal problems in seam areas.
Highly recommended.
Last night it took me just over an hour to stitch six 8bit images to produce a near 'perfect' result. I was able to do other things while this was going on in the background. I was able to check the script box that appears from time to time to see that enblend was generating Gaussian and Laplacian pyramids!! The only limitation and it is a small limitation, is that only 8bit files can be generated. Get your source files right in 16bit mode before you stitch them.
Your mileage may vary, but I do not agree with the notion that these are tools for hobbyists and experimenters,
Another example below, final file size 125MB.
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[JohnBeale]

[font color=\'#000000\']I just noticed "Getting Started with Digital Panoramas" by Joe Beda http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorial...panoramas.shtml

PanoTools with a graphical front-end is great but until now there has been one thing missing: a way to fix all those visible seams on the sky without a lot of manual tweeks in Photoshop.

Well, this problem has now been solved! The answer is "Enblend" by Andrew Mihal

http://www-cad.eecs.berkeley.edu/~mihal/enblend
  
He has versions for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and the price is right (open source).

This does blending between the images in the panorama the "right" way to make perfectly smooth transitions on the sky, and accurate transitions on detail areas too. It does this by analysing the image to find which parts are low detail (wide blend area) and which parts have fine detail (sharper transitions). It gives better results than I can do by hand and of course is MUCH faster than a manual process.

The end result is that true seamless panoramas, which are not obviously different from ultra-high-resolution single frame shots, are now accessible to a wide audience, not just those willing to spend lots of hours in Photoshop on touch-up. As you can tell I'm pretty enthusiastic about it.[/font]

[Edward]

[font color=\'#000000\']> There's also essentially no 16 bit file implementation.

I use PTGui, which is another frontend PTAssembler and it generates 16 bit Tiff files from 16 bit TIFF files.[/font]

[Edward]

[font color=\'#000000\']I stand corrected - despite appearances in the instruction, enblend does not handle 16 bit files.  I am not sure how much of a problem that really is, if you use C1 or the like to preprocess raw files so there is limited correction to do later, but it does limit flexibility.[/font]