Author	Message
Sean Campbell Posts: 2 Location: Cody, Wy, United States Registered: 31 Mar 2005	Best Stitching Software Posted: 31 Mar 2005 at 1:48 GMT It's been a while since I've been here, man has it changed. I see that the review aren't around anymore either. So I'm wondering, what is the best stitching software available today. I'm still on an old, at least 2 years old, copy of PanoramaFactory. I'm sure there is probably better by now so I'm looking for your guys opinions. I'd actually like 2 opinions, first which is the best value for the money? and second, if money was no object which is just best? Thanks Sean alert moderator
magicpixel Posts: 5 Location: Australia Registered: 10 Mar 2005	Re: Best Stitching Software Posted: 31 Mar 2005 at 2:32 GMT I'd recommend Panotools with a GUI, either PTGUI or PTAssembler. Add the free AutoPano and Enblend plugins and you've got powerful/fast/accurate pano software that costs very little. Great to have Panotools installed anyway, to make use of some handy free Photoshop filters, like PTLens. I don't think there is a 'money no object/just best' answer - just depends on what you want to produce and what type of software you enjoy using e.g. personally I think products like RealViz are a complete and unnecessary rip-off alert moderator
TriggerHappY Posts: 601 Location: vancouver, Canada Registered: 21 Jul 2004	Re: Best Stitching Software Posted: 31 Mar 2005 at 9:33 GMT Most of the commercial qtvrs i have been lately admiring were created with realviz. Many were created with other aplications but the impact is the same when there done right. Now Realviz have a much more affordable package available on the market,Brand new and smooth is excited about the release of the new Panoweaver 4.0 but yeah the ptgui looks excellent so there is a bunch stuff new. have fun Dylan alert moderator
Ady Posts: 6 Location: Northampton, United Kingdom Registered: 31 Mar 2005	Re: Best Stitching Software Posted: 31 Mar 2005 at 10:10 GMT I have been using RealViz stitcher for all my tours www.opticalfx.co.uk and while it gives excellent results, it's very fussy. A few times my nodal point has been a bit out and it won't have it. Others that use PTMac have been able to put the tours together for me no problem! I keep meaning to have a proper go with PTMac but don't find it as usable as stitcher. I certainly don't see you being able to do handheld stuff through stitcher. One big plus is the stencil tool that allows you to remove sections of overlapped images, i.e. a person/car in one image and not the next will apprear ghosted if you don't do this. This came in handy on these London tours www.london-virtualtours.co.uk - I spent about 2 hours on the top tour! Ady alert moderator
Rivani Posts: 22 Location: Sweden Registered: 30 Jan 2005	3DVista Stitcher 3.0 Posted: 31 Mar 2005 at 12:25 GMT updated: 31 Mar 2005 at 14:35 GMT PhotoBuilder from Anything3D is a very good Stitcher if you just need one-row multi-shot stitching. However I believe the best option is the newly released 3DVista Stitcher 3.0, the only all-round stitcher. Give it a try and see for yourself: www.3dvista.com/downloads/stitcher30.exe It supports almost all kinds of optics: - Standard zoom lenses - Wide & Ultra wide-angle - Full-frame fisheyes - Circular fisheyes (Nikon & Raynox) - Cropped fisheyes (like 8mm Sigma on dSLRs) - One-shot optics (donuts) - Cubic face images Very capable software, many improvements, new cool features, faster stitching, a clean & simple straight-forward graphic user interface, good image enhancement capabilities, auto and manual stitching modes ... I think they will be offering discounts to new users and users of other pano-programs. Ask them about it or just mention "Rivani" from Panoguide forum. Happy stitching Rivani alert moderator
byron2 Posts: 218 Location: Perth, Australia Registered: 13 Sep 2004	Re: Best Stitchers Posted: 31 Mar 2005 at 12:31 GMT You dont need stencil mode if you have PTmac/PTgui. You just export in Photoshop layers and mask. Another London series! - www.flash360.net/panos/london. Advantage is you have more pinpoint control over these layers. alert moderator
redeye Posts: 192 Location: Barnsley, United Kingdom Registered: 5 Mar 2005	Re: Best Stitchers Posted: 31 Mar 2005 at 14:18 GMT Wow! Fantastic panoramas! Kinda...(choke) makes ya proud to be British! Can you share some details with us? Camera, lens, software, techniques? How do ya get that shot of the Thames? Awesome!! Very nice site also... regards Lee alert moderator
Sean Campbell Posts: 2 Location: Cody, Wy, United States Registered: 31 Mar 2005	Re: Best Stitchers Posted: 2 Apr 2005 at 18:23 GMT Thanks guys, I'll give those a try. Sean alert moderator
Smooth Posts: 1455 Location: Australia Registered: 21 Jul 2004	Re: Best Stitchers Posted: 3 Apr 2005 at 13:09 GMT A lot depends on what you wish to stitch? What camera lens combo you are using etc. For fisheye lenses nothing beats Panoweaver for simplicity. Panoweaver 4.0 is due out within a couple of weeks. After testing the Beta version of both Panoweaver 4.0 and 3DVista Stitcher my vote 100% still goes to Panoweaver. Although 3DVista Stitcher 3.0 has improved over 2.5 the results are still no as easy to achieve or as good as Panoweaver 4.0 The best all round stitcher albeit no very user friendly is PTGui (Panotools) and the cheapest. Be sure to put them all through their paces. Regards, Smooth www.smooth360.com alert moderator
Ady Posts: 6 Location: Northampton, United Kingdom Registered: 31 Mar 2005	Re: Best Stitchers Posted: 4 Apr 2005 at 13:07 GMT So Byron2 you're a PTMac user,mmm I really need to get my head round this, everyone keeps telling me to. Did you start with this, have you ever used Realviz? How long do the tours take with PTMac? My one of Buckingham Palace london-virtualtours.co.uk/virtualtours/index.htm took over 2 hours because of all the stenciling. So do all the seperate images export as layers then in PTMac? Hope you don't mind me quizzing but as there aren't many of us doing this quality of work I am interested in your workflow. Thanks, Ady alert moderator
mekkelek Posts: 35 Location: Canada Registered: 20 Sep 2004	Re: Best Stitching Software Posted: 5 Apr 2005 at 1:40 GMT Hi, And what do you think about the "new" IseeMedia PhotoVista 3.5??? I think, it cost only $59.95 and supports all type of lenses. Am I correct? alert moderator
byron2 Posts: 218 Location: Perth, Australia Registered: 13 Sep 2004	Re: Best Stitchers Posted: 5 Apr 2005 at 8:32 GMT Hi Ady, Yes I use PTGUI but ptmac must be similar. workflow?? - 2 hours is quite a bit. I take around 30 minutes to complete the ptgui + photoshop. The computer takes a bit longer than that so I usually use 3 computers and swap between them. I am quite quick with gadgets though (geek in other words) - I had a friend who, even after 3 months work, couldn`t do more than 4 in an 8 hour day! If you good with photoshop masks this will help allot! Ive tried all software (as far as I know) and always go back to ptgui and panotools. - Nothing worse than a pano that you cant do anything with - alert moderator
GaryHall Posts: 7 Location: Fort Lauderdale, Florida, United States Registered: 10 Apr 2005	Re: Best Stitchers Posted: 10 Apr 2005 at 23:23 GMT I have been part of Gilbert Morin's PanaVue Beta 3.0 <www.panavue.com/&gt; and would like to report on what I have found. The package is super simple to use first of all and has some intuitive features that allow very fast and extremely accurate stitching. Unfortunately ImageAssembler was not specifically designed for multi-rows, or equivalently, multi-columns stitching. Mr. Morin said there was a way around the above situation You should stitch each column separately, in a Panorama Stitching project, then stitch all the columns together in a Mosaic Stitching project, 2 flags for each image. The second step has to be a Mosaic Stitching project since there is no projection to do, the images were already projected using an equirectangular projection in step 1, with the Panorama Stitching projects. In Step 2 images are simply put one next to the other. Well, I kinda gave up because of some technical aspects on both sides. My goal was to make a 360 pano with nearly 180 degree view. Without getting into the specifics here, I stitched 8 pics into a single column that was about 160 degrees from top view to the bottom view. The PiA 3.0 works like a dream. I mean you can make 18 columns or projects (8 pics per column) in an hour and only several will require "flag" moving to get it straight and that too is a snap. I can't say enough how easy that part is and the accuracy can't be beat. (I'll be glad to answer any questions about PiA) My problem was stitching these 1801 x 8048 pixel columns together using the Mosaic method, even with 8 available flags method. The errors were just to great to overcome. The program has not matured enough to push the stitching to the extrema limits I wanted it to go. Now a little bit about me and what I need. I am really a newbie in the pano world and have been absent for almost a year because I was working with a 350 MHz Win98 machine that was painful to work with as you can imagine. I gave up trying to make pano's because of those limitations. Now I have a XP pro, 3.4 GHz, 2 gig DDR2 512 RAM, SATA 10 K rpm HD, 800 FSB speed demon. It now take less than a minute to see a preview - 2 minutes for a final. O.K. Here is my problem: I want to make 180 degree, 360 wrap around pano's. I don't have any wide angle or fish eye lenses, just the one that came with my Oly 5050 (FOV 41 degrees, camera is set sideways). I use a tripod, Kaidan head and a 14 inch compass rose for exact and repeatable settings when taking pics per row. I even went to my local machine shop to check the "exactness" of the Kaidan head and added a machinist 2 bubble level when set up on a granite leveling table. Believe me when I say the SOB is level. I have related my technical problem with PiA and today I have tried to use Pano Tools Assembler. I have nearly pulled out my hair trying to use PTA, I can't even get 2 columns to stitch much less than 18. That program is so difficult to figure out unlike PiA. With PiA you don't have to know anything and the results are terrific (unless you push the envelope like I have). What other method(s) can I attempt to use? How about Quick Time or is that a "Mac" machine program? I see many great pano's that were done with QT, any other suggestions? I see here there are a lot of other products mentioned here, but I just don't have the experience to"test" them all out. 3DVista Stitcher 3.0 and Panoweaver 4.0 sound great - BUT - I certainly don't need any more hair pulling by additional experimenting. Do you need more information, let me know. Thanks. Warm regards. Gary alert moderator
erik Posts: 69 Location: Kortrijk, Belgium Registered: 5 Aug 2004	Re: Best Stitching Software Posted: 11 Apr 2005 at 8:10 GMT Gary, have you tried www.autostitch.net ? Its easy and it's free, with good shots it should not have ane problem. Erik alert moderator
John Houghton Posts: 2265 Location: Hitchin, United Kingdom Registered: 17 Jan 2005	Re: Best Stitchers Posted: 11 Apr 2005 at 8:37 GMT I'm not surprised that you gave up with PTAssembler when attempting a project of this size. Panorama Tools is not learned in an evening - it takes many people months to realize how simple it is. It is a very useful general tool to have in your software kitbag, even if you routinely use an automatic stitcher. The various gui front end programs all do much the same job and the end result is the same. Nevertheless, PTGui has been developed very much more in a 360x180 environment and I think it would be more suited to your paricular task. In particular, it has a Panorama Editor window, which is dynamically updated to show the current stitching state at all times, so you don't have to be doing previews all the time. You can also drag individual images about on the spherical stitching surface as well as the entire assembled group of images. Inevitably, PTGui will be much more work than an automatic stitcher, but you do have lots more control. If you have no previous experience of Pano Tools, then you need to get some confidence by stitching a simple row of half-a-dozen images. Then, it is a simple extension to add all the remaining images of a 360 row and stitch those in. This will establish good values for the lens parameters. Once you have these, you need far fewer control points to align images with each other. You can then build on this foundation to add another row, etc. You can find a PTGui beginners tutorial and quickstart project at homepage.ntlworld.com/j.houghton/pttute.htm . John alert moderator

• About Us
• Contact Us
• Site Index
• Terms & Conditions

© Copyright 1998 - 2008 James Rigg. All rights reserved.

• XHTML
• CSS
• s508