Effective stitching program

[perry_halicas]

I am interested in this area of joining multiple images, by working

in 'layers'.

The stitch programs I have tried several of and they dont give me

what i am after.

 

I find my technique is a bit 'hit and miss' and that means it's very

time consuming.

 

So I'm after some other information/tutorials/publications/advice -

anything! There has to be a better way of going about it than i am at

present.

My main concerns are probably the obvious ones - sizing, seamless

joins, and getting the overall tones and colours the same over a

range of lets say 5 frames.

 

I'm using PS 6. I have a fairly fast computer.

 

thanks for any help

perry

[mikep]

check this out http://www.pobega.com/article1.htm

[michael_dam_hansen]

If you want the best results there is only on tool. Helmut Dersch's PanoTools. PanoTools consists of some plugins for Photoshop and a stand some stand alone programs. The software is pretty difficult to use but a guy called Joost Nieuwenhuijse has made a GUI that�s called PTGui. This makes the production a lot easier.

It takes some time to learn but it's worth it.

 

You can find more about PanoTools and other stiching sofware at this site:

http://www.panoguide.com/software/reviews/panotools_v21.html

[plattro]

I agree, the PanoTools family is great!<BR>

I use both <A href="http://www.ptgui.com">PTGui</A>, <A href="http://www.tawbaware.com">PTAssembler</A>, and <A href="http://www.kekus.com">PTMac</A>, as well as the plugins.<BR>

All of them have well written online tutorials, and all are able to produce multilayer Photoshop.psd file output (As well as a dozen other file formats). You have the option of masks or not, and the width of the feathering.<BR>

<BR>

Personally, I don't think it's so hard to use, but it does take some time to learn (I'm still learning!), and a little patience, and it's not fully automated, but the flexability and results are extremely good. The shareware fees are also quite reasonable, too.<BR>

There are also many other GPL and shareware tools based on PanoTools which also give the possibility to correct lens distortions (Barrel, pincushion), chromatic aberations, wideangle light falloff, the works.<BR>

<BR>

What other stitch programs have you tried?

[majid]

I use <a href="http://www.panavue.com/products/index.htm">PanaVue ImageAssembler</a>, because it allows me to specify control points, and it gives me good results, even with parallax.

[sean de merchant httpw]

Assuming your lense is highly correctefixed focal length lenses, then there is no simpler tool than Photoshop (PS). If not, then depending on how bad the optical distortions (barrel, pincushion, ...) your lense induces you may need to make some corrections for that. Your personal quality standards will influence this need.

 

Take a pair of images with about 30% overlap. Note that 30% is a rough figure selected to overcome the worst optical distortion found at the edges of an image. Now increase the canvas size of the first image to about 200% of its original size. Now do the following:

 

1) Paste the second image over the original as a new layer.

 

2) Set the blending mode of the new layer to 'difference'.

 

3) Use the move tool (the letter v is its shortcut) to move the new layer into rough alignment.

 

4) Zoom in to 500% zoom of the join.

 

5) Position the new layer with pixel accuracy.

 

6) Create a vertical selection using the 'lasso' to remove unwanted parts of the new layer. This selection should only be on areas that are close to black as the two frames are very close in value at those points.

 

7) Feather the selection by 2 or 3 pixels and delete the extraneous areas from the new layer.

 

8) If you have any areas with low frequency textures (i.e., sky), then you may need to do a new selection with the lasso on those areas and feather it by 50 pixels or so.

 

9) Set the blending mode of the new layer to normal.

 

10) Repeat the above for each additonal frame you need to add.

 

This works extremely well without any additional specialized software. The following links shows an examples of this technique in low resolution:

 

http://www.tearnet.com/sean/SPA_Slide.asp?cat=13&pic=SPD50066c2.jpg&count=13

http://www.tearnet.com/sean/SPA_Slide.asp?cat=13&pic=SPD50020.jpg&count=10

http://www.tearnet.com/sean/SPA_Slide.asp?cat=13&pic=SPD50137c.jpg&count=15

 

If you need any extensive level of color correction to match up the frames, then I suggest you reshoot in full manual mode. But, you can either eyeball it or use difference mode to do such correction.

[x]

You can get most of what you want using PTAssembler at: http://www.tawbaware.com/ptasmblr.htm This uses Panorama Tools to do the actual stitching. The only area where I've found it gives less than great results is in blending colours to match between frames. You can try the programme before you buy and it's pretty cheap anyway. Gives you the maximum amount of control while still being pretty easy to use.

 

Panavue works well if you have good images to start with. If the alignment was less than perfect you may get rather obvious seams and my experience with colour blending was not a happy one - usually switched it off. Reasonable price and easy to use.

 

Lastly the new Photoshop CS has a pano feature which is extremely easy to use and should give good seamless joins if the images were good to start with. The colour blending is good and the output file can optionally be Photoshop layered (though no blending in this case) so giving you control over joins between frames. Downside is it's extremely expensive unless you were buying it anyway for other features