panorama stitching

dwross2 · Apr 5, 2007

Hi All:

Can anyone recommend a pan stitching plug-in? I have been scanning 6x17 negs on a Nikon 9000 in three 6x6 pieces, making individual digital negs and then printing as a triptych. I would like to make one enlarged panorama format digital negative for contact printing. I run both PS7 and CS2 with Windows. Although I have been using PS since Version 4, I have never bought a 'plug-in', so take that into consideration if you describe your recommendation .

Thank you, d

Pinholemaster · Apr 5, 2007

Do yourself a favor, download the beta version of PhotoShop CS3 and use its panoramic merge feature built into the program. You won't have to buy any 3rd party plug-in.

SC2 and do a pretty good merge, but you have to use manually created layer masks to blend each panel.

Watch this on-line movie. It will explain why you should use SC3

http://av.adobe.com/russellbrown/CS3PhotoMergeSM.mov

dwross2 · Apr 5, 2007

Walt:
Thank you. InCREDible. Brown calls it "magic" and he's not far wrong. I still think of masks as something you make in the darkroom with pin registration. I finally broke down and upgraded to CS2 a couple of weeks ago. I'm not sure my nervous system could adjust to CS3 so soon!

ann · Apr 5, 2007

i tried cs2 and it was ok but had issues of varies kinds. I tried several other software programs, and the best if found was from Serif , and was very reasonable . It also took a series of photos that none of the other programs could put together without showing a crooked roof line. It is based on a piece of software called Autostitch which is amazing.

i will check out the video to see what is happening with CS3 but i hardly use CS2 let alone another version.

thanks for the suggestion.

ps. couldn't resist. check this website

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html

this is some serious stitching.

Joe Lipka · Apr 6, 2007

I think that 3rd party stitching software was probably a necessity a few years ago. Photoshop stitching is now good enough that in either CS2 or CS3 you can stick with the internal functions.

Saw the link to Russell Preston Brown. Go to the Russell Preston Brown sight and download all sorts of goodies from the Good Doctor. His color to B&W conversion action is now my standard. It is wonderful.

donbga · Apr 6, 2007

ann said:
i tried cs2 and it was ok but had issues of varies kinds. I tried several other software programs, and the best if found was from Serif , and was very reasonable . It also took a series of photos that none of the other programs could put together without showing a crooked roof line. It is based on a piece of software called Autostitch which is amazing.

i will check out the video to see what is happening with CS3 but i hardly use CS2 let alone another version.

thanks for the suggestion.

ps. couldn't resist. check this website

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html

this is some serious stitching.

Ann, Denise and Joe,

I had my first Photoshop CS2 stitching experience just last night prior to reading this thread. I was amazed at how easy the process was and what a good job CS2 did. Since getting my first DSLR a couple of weeks ago I'm certainly no expert with this sort of thing. I had tried the included PhotoStitch software that Canon makes and that was terrible, hence my total surprise with my results. The stitched sequences that I made were handheld off tripod.

I'm sure the other stitching packages are pretty good, probably better than PS but CS2 was very easy to use.

My 2 cents,

Don Bryant

dwross2 · Apr 6, 2007

Hi All:

As is happening so often lately, I think I'm asking a simple 'technical' question, and the answers send me off into flights of awe and creative fancy. This stuff is amazing. For now, I'll just be trying to learn how to make a pan digital neg, but there is a lot of potential here. I'm nominating panoramic photography as a category when jd gets a chance to expand the site.

Denise

p.s. One of the things I really love about this site is that the 'old digital pros' are so patient and helpful to us newbies. I've never gotten so much as a sniff that it's uncool to express slack-jawed wonder at it all. Thanks!

donbga · Apr 6, 2007

Eating some crow

dwross said:
Hi All:

As is happening so often lately, I think I'm asking a simple 'technical' question, and the answers send me off into flights of awe and creative fancy. This stuff is amazing. For now, I'll just be trying to learn how to make a pan digital neg, but there is a lot of potential here. I'm nominating panoramic photography as a category when jd gets a chance to expand the site.

Denise

p.s. One of the things I really love about this site is that the 'old digital pros' are so patient and helpful to us newbies. I've never gotten so much as a sniff that it's uncool to express slack-jawed wonder at it all. Thanks!

I took a very critical look at some of the stitchs I did yesterday with PS CS2 and found some really poor blends. So apparently CS3 out performs CS2 in this regard from other reports I've received from CS3 beta users.

Don Bryant

ann · Apr 6, 2007

Don,

that was what i found as well. very sutle, but none the less it showed.

I did go on line and check out the brown video and when i have the chance i would certainly give cs3 a trial run.

i also found that the cs2 had trouble with a row of roof lines from multi buildings and couldn't quited match them up altho the rest of the image looked fine.

computers are such strange tools lol

P C Headland · Apr 18, 2007

I found even an old copy of PS Elements 2 and photomerge did a pretty good job of stitching two halves of a 4x5 that was scanned in two passes.

For anything more complex, I've been getting very good results from the latest version of Hugin (hugin.sf.net). It's free and available for Windows, Mac and Linux. The tutorials on the site are quite helpful too.

rogein · Apr 18, 2007

I use PTGui as my stitching app. I've stitched everything from multiple frames taken with a dslr to 8x16/7x17 negs scanned in parts on a flatbed scanner and then stitched together. The stitched file is saved as a PS layer file and any 'cleanups' are a snap to correct in PS.

Kirk Gittings · Apr 18, 2007

The new stitch n CS3 is a huge improvement over CS2. It may be entirely adequate for your purposes. I do it professionally for my clients and find that sometimes it will solve problems that PTGui really struggles with.

rogein · Apr 18, 2007

When CS3 beta was released many were impressed with the improved photomerge function. While it is an improvement over CS2 I found the opposite - sometimes CS3 choked on stitches PTGui had no problem with. I guess much depends on the images being stitched?

donbga · Apr 18, 2007

rogein said:
sometimes CS3 choked on stitches PTGui had no problem with. I guess much depends on the images being stitched?

Can you give or post some examples?

Thanks,

Don Bryant

Kirk Gittings · Apr 19, 2007

I recently made a mistake not providing enough overlap on one segment of a mural documentation for a museum client. In addition, the mural wrapped around a 90 degree angle. PtGui could not handle either the poor overlap or the 90 degree wrap. I fussed with it for hours trying to establish reference points it could recognize and finally went back to CS3 and had it finished near perfectly in less than 30 minutes.

rogein · Apr 19, 2007

Don Bryant said:
Can you give or post some examples?

Thanks,

Don Bryant

Don,

This is part of a 10 frame pano which PTGui stitched w/o errors. Here's the kind of small error (100% view) I sometimes get when using CS3 Photomerge. (Actually a total of 3 stitch errors in this section of the pano using Photomerge.) The only intervention on my part with PTGui was removing control points and reoptimizing until it gave me the 'very good' message. Granted diagonally running lines like over head wires (or the face of buildings) are always a challenge to stitch but I admit I'm picky.

Kirk Gittings · Apr 19, 2007

see

http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=14827&hl=cs3+stitch

toyotadesigner · Apr 20, 2007

Ever tried the free Hugin?

http://hugin.sourceforge.net/

amphoto · Apr 23, 2007

stitched up

The thing to recognise with stitched panoramas is the type of blending algorithm being used. Gentle, soft tones across an image boundary (such as in a sky) is a different situation than (say) a busy street scene with close-up objects and parallax error. One blending algorithm, such as smartblend, would be a better choice for the former, while something like enblend would help with the latter. You're best-off looking for a stitching application that gives you some control over the type of blend being used, rather than simply automating the whole process. I think Realviz Stitcher now offers smartblend (or is it enblend, I forget) but it's pretty pricey. I've used a few different programs (including Realviz, Photoshop, Panorama Factory, PanoTools etc.), but for me the best program (judged in terms of output quality/ease of use), and which can stitch huge images (if that's the way you want to go), is Autopano Pro (http://www.autopano.net) available at around 99 euros. It can also write its output file in .psd format with each image on a seperate layer along with its blending layer mask so you can perform minor edits if you need to, without rendering the panorama again.

panorama stitching

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