Stitcher Unlimited

Rating:
Updated: 22 May 2009 at 15:41 GMT, by James Rigg [Panoguide]

This review refers to Stitcher Unlimited 2009

Since Autodesk acquired RealViz in early May 2008, the Stitcher product line has been simplified and today there is just one version of Stitcher and no longer any "lighter" version. Autodesk have also significantly reduced the price compared to pre-acquisition.

What's new?

Stitcher Unlimited 2009 has not changed much since the previous version 5.7, and at first sight it is merely a rebranding of the former RealViz product. There are however a few changes, both good and bad:
* Fisheye lens support has been improved with support for the Sunex 185 degree lens
* HDR image blending from source images has been added, meaning you can create HDR panoramas without needing to create HDR images for each frame
* Mac PowerPC support has been dropped (now Mac Intel only)
* Batch functionality dropped
* Some user interface changes notably in the authoring controls

This list is quite a lot shorter than Autodesk's official list of what's new and that's because Autodesk have conveniently included details of what was new in version 5.7. The user interface in version 5.7 was improved with GPU acceleration, 2D as well as 3D preview and selectable rendering. Stitcher Unlimited 5.6 introduced Mac Universal compatibility and support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging (but in 5.6 you need to blend exposures in something like Photomatix first and then stitch the HDRs).

Overview

Stitcher was probably the first really user-friendly spherical stitching software, and I was really impressed with it when I first reviewed it on panoguide. At the time (2001) the alternatives were Helmut Dersch's PanoTools (using the optimizer, so having to write a script in pseudo-code), Enroute's Powerstitch (since discontinued), and iMove's Spherical Photo Solution. Of these Stitcher was, in my opinion, by far the easiest to use.

Work the way you want to

Some stitching software provides fully automatic alignment and stitching, without manual control if the software gets it wrong. A few products provide manual control, without much automatic functionality. Of course what you really want is the best of both worlds and that is precisely what REALVIZ Stitcher gives you.

Stitcher provides fully automatic alignment and you don't even have to put your images in any kind of order. You can align them one by one by dragging them into alignment and Stitcher will fine tune the position for you (or you can force a stitch regardless). And for more manual precision, you can set control points (matching points between any pair of images) which Stitcher will then use for alignment. You can also use any combination of these ways of aligning images.

If your pictures contain plenty of detail, Stitcher should be able to automatically work out the alignment of the images for you. But if you shoot an outdoor scene with lots of featureless blue sky, automatic stitching might not be able to work out how to accurately position sky shots. Now you can let Stitcher automatically align everything, and then adjust the sky shots yourself afterwards - really simple.

Fisheye lenses and linear distortion

Stitcher will automatically recognise your lens from the EXIF data in your images, or you can specify the lens yourself. The best bit is that Stitcher can also calculate linear distortion in your images and compensate for it. Just stitch three images and then select High Distortion to calibrate your lens. Providing the three images you are using contain plenty of detail, Stitcher will accurately calculate your lens's linear distortion characteristics and compensate for them.

Stitcher Unlimited includes fisheye lens support for stitching 2 or more fisheye images, and this includes 2-shot circular fisheye lens stitching (just like iPIX used to do) and support for the Sunex 185 degree fisheye lens. This also includes support for barrel fisheye images. "Barrel" means that you used a super-wide 8mm equivalent fisheye lens which is supposed to create circular 180+ degree field-of-view images, but you did not use a full-frame digital SLR. The effect is that the sides of the image get cropped, so your images have curved top and bottom and straight sides (barrel shaped).

Stencils and blending

Moving people, vehicles and other objects can cause real problems when you shoot panoramas - you can easily end up with ghosts, vehicles cut in half and so on. If you use any software other than Stitcher, you probably have to retouch your images afterwards. Or maybe you output layered PhotoShop PSD files and you adjust the blending.

In Stitcher resolving these problems is really easy. If someone moves between shots, open the stencil tool and draw a polygon around the person and select Preserve Inside. In another picture, a bus is half way out of shot and you want to make sure you don't end up with half a bus in the stitch - draw a polygon around it, and this time select Remove Inside. It's really quick and easy and a lot faster and easier than retouching a layered PhotoShop file. If nothing else about Stitcher impresses you, the Stencil functionality should.

The limitation of the stencil functionality is that you have no control of the blending at the edge of the stencil area. For this you have to create a mask in PhotoShop on the source image (since Stitcher supports PhotoShop PSD files including both layers and masks) or alternatively when you render the panorama you render a multi-layer PSD file and then post-edit the blending masks in PhotoShop. Both of these are more time consuming than creating a stencil in Stitcher and it is worth bearing in mind that post-editing a multi-layer PSD file is power and memory hungry if you are creating high resolution panoramas. Having said all that, no other panoramic stitching software currently has any kind of stencil tool, so despite this limitation of the stencil functionality, Stitcher Unlimited 2009 is still ahead of the competition in this respect.

Many output options

Stitcher can create flat, cylindrical, spherical and cubic panoramic images in JPEG and TIFF formats. Stitcher also supports HTML publishing, Shockwave 3D, VRML, ImmerVision PurePlayer and QuickTime VR (cylindrical and cubic and including hotspots). QuickTime VR is particularly well supported and I think every possible option and QuickTime feature is made available and easy to use.

You can control the blending method and that includes using Enblend if you want to. You can also control the sharpening, interpolation method and save all your render settings for easy reuse. Stitcher also supports 16 bit images and input and output formats including PhotoShop PSD files with or without layers and masks. Note that includes layered PSD as source files for stitching.

Stitcher Unlimited can also convert between panoramic image projections, and convert previously saved images into QuickTime VR movies, etc. For example, you can output your spherical panorama and edit it in, say, Adobe PhotoShop, and then convert the edited image to a QuickTime cubic movie easily afterwards. (You can of course do this with any stitched image, cylindrical, cubic etc, and you can convert the edited image to any of the other formats supported by Stitcher.)

QuickTime support

The QuickTime support includes just about everything you could want - you can control codecs, preview options, streaming, set the playback window size and set the default, minimum and maximum zoom, pan, tilt etc. This means that when exporting an image that is less than a full spherical image you can create a cubic movie and then limit the user's ability to 'move' in the panorama so as to avoid displaying the black 'blank' area. (It also means that if you export a cylindrical panorama of less than 360 degrees you can limit the left/right pan.)

Stitcher Unlimited provides a really easy-to-use hotspot interface for creating QuickTime VR virtual tours for the web. At the time of writing this review, Stitcher is the only software solution I know of for Windows that offers QuickTime cubic hotspot authoring.

Templates and batch scripting

If you shoot a lot of panoramas you've probably got your prefered equipment and way of shooting your pictures. Stitcher Unlimited allows you to save a project as a template and use it to stitch different sets of images that were shot in the same way. Unfortunately Autodesk have removed the batch stitching functionality in Stitcher Unlimited 2009, which is a shame as this feature would allow you to cue up several panoramas and leave them to render overnight or while you go out or have a coffee break.

Who needs a leveller?

If you are shooting a spherical panorama, you really don't need to make sure your camera/tripod is level any more. Not only can Stitcher guess where the horizon is in your project and level the scene, you can also quickly and easily define the precise horizon by drawing vertices that are horizontal or vertical (for example the side of a building).

The real time preview of the panoramic image makes it easy for you to adjust the viewpoint (important if you want to print or perhaps retouch the panorama afterwards). You can also change the real time preview projection (cylindrical, spherical, cubic etc).

Movie output

Stitcher can also output a movie from your panoramic image. Just enter movie editing mode, and you can define a sequence of movements around the panoramic scene and output them as a QuickTime or AVI movie. You can control frame rate and resolution too. I have not tested it, but I suspect that DVD output (just a movie, not interactive of course) should be really easy.

HDR

The core engine of Stitcher processes images in 32bits (a JPEG image is 8bit, a TIFF image up to 16), and includes support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) stitching using the OpenEXR (EXR) and Radiance RGBE (HDR) file formats. The main target audience for this functionality will be computer game and film special effects creators who need HDR Images to achieve convincing special effects. However this feature should also interest professional photographers having to deal with difficult (e.g. high contrast) lighting conditions.

To create an HDR panorama using Stitcher Unlimited, you will need to shoot multiple exposures for each frame that makes up the panorama. New in Stitcher Unlimited 2009 is the ability to load these multiple exposures straight into Stitcher and let Stitcher take care of blending the exposures together. This feature is a welcome step forward and eliminates another step in HDR workflow, however the functionality here is limited compared to dedicated HDR tools such as Photomatix Pro. I suspect (I am not experienced in HDR photography) that for now better results will be achieved by using Photomatix or similar to blend exposures first and then load the EXR ir HDR files into Stitcher for stitching.

The stencil functionality of Stitcher, which is so powerful and useful for non HDR panoramas, is less useful for HDR images, because you cannot apply a stencil selectively to one of the multiple exposures you have shot. Shooting an HDR panorama in public may therefore be more complicated because stencils will not help you quite as much as they do in a non-HDR panorama. I have yet to properly test and explore the HDR functionality myself, so please let me know if you know better!

A product company that listens

Several previous versions of Stitcher have been reviewed on panoguide. Each and every time a new version comes out, criticisms made on panoguide of the previous versions get fixed. And the latest Stitcher products are no exception. As if to prove the point, here are the criticisms of version 4.0 and what has happened since:

1. If you have to manually align images, it is not easy. With control point stitching you can now easily and precisely stitch images manually, in addition to the drag-and-drop interface.

2. Fisheye lenses not supported. Stitcher Unlimited now supports fisheye lenses.

3. Too expensive compared to alternatives. Autodesk have reduced the price

4. HDR panoramas require you to use an HDR application to blend exposures before stitching. Stitcher Unlimited 2009 can perform (basic) exposure blending for HDR.


So as you can see the RealViz team listen. However for the first time in several years some features have been removed from Stitcher and I can't help feeling this is a small step forward and a step back in other ways. It remains to be seen how responsive Autodesk will be to feedback in the future.


Market position & conclusions

AutoDesk, which incorporates RealViz, specialises in software imaging solutions for imaging professionals from film special effects to 3D CAD models and animations. So, as you might expect, Stitcher is designed specifically to create high resolution spherical/cubic panoramic images from any number of images.

PTGui provides similar stitching flexibility to Stitcher Unlimited (fully automatic alignment, control points, drag-and-drop, etc) and has very similar rendering precision and functionality. Although PTGui is cheaper than Stitcher, Stitcher provides some very valuable additional features in particular QuickTime VR support and stencils. Easypano Panoweaver is another well-known image stitching solution and its latest version 6 now supports the same range of fisheye and non-fisheye lenses as Stitcher Unlimited. Now that Autodesk has slashed the price of Stitcher Unlimited, it is significantly (USD 150 at the time of writing) cheaper than Panoweaver, and overall I think Stitcher is easier to use and has more features. The main differentiators are: QuickTime VR output (including hotspots) and the stencil functionality.

If you want to stitch fisheye lens images and you are on a tight budget, you will still probably want to go for PTGui or another PanoTools-based product. But if you are looking for an all-in-one solution to your image stitching needs, I think it's pretty hard to beat AutoDesk Stitcher Unlimited.

Having said that, this latest update is disappointing and for most existing users of Stitcher Unlimited it is not worth upgrading to Stitcher Unlimited 2009. Nevertheless, Stitcher Unlimited remains one of the best stitching applications available.

I think if you have never used Stitcher before, once you try it and explore all of its features and capabilities, you won't want to use anything else.

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Rating:
Updated: 10 Jul 2008 at 3:12 GMT, by sdphotoforum

5.7 is extremely easy to use and renders with no problems 98% of the time. If when its not perfect a simple edit in CS3 takes care of it.

I have tried the 5.6 PC version on a friends computer and for some reason it doesn't perform as well as the MAC version, not just on performance but on the stitching. The 5.6 PC version rendered allot of ghosts and didn't do to well on auto blending.

I never really needed to do panoramas in the past but I picked up on jobs for several Hotels here in San Diego and needed to get it right the first time. I understand that with PTGUI you can get really specific but I honestly tried to make Panos with PTGUI and got frustrated.

With the recommendations from PanoGuide I tried all of them, with complete disgust and thinking I was going to have to refund my clients deposit and or hire someone else to edit my shots.
I finally DL the trial version of StitcherUnlimited and from the first render I was sold. I have not tried all of the extra functions as of yet but anxious to try them out when I have some free time.

PROS: Easy to understand interface, Quick Preview Mode, Great Auto functions, Generous Export Options. Can re export panos from cylindrical to cube to spherical etc

CONS: Cost, Used to be able to edit a pano in 8 to 10 min now for some unseen reason it has more than quadrupled. Rendering Times up to 45-85 min if using extra rendering options. As I am writing this I have turned of sharpening and rendering time elapsed is @ 31:05

CONCLUSION: When someone says that PTGUI is better because it is more precise I don't see it really being an issue, With 5.7 you load the images and the rest is in plain english (i.e Panos For Dummies).

www.manrphotography.com/Portfolio/Panoramas

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Rating:
Updated: 20 Sep 2007 at 15:57 GMT, by Psychedelicious

Stitcher is very nice... and in many cases will provide flawless output with a minimum of fuss. I'd love to give it 6 stars, but I cannot because PTGui deserves 6 stars, so Stitcher can only have five. Why is this? Stitcher is too expensive, and is also not quite capable of reaching the level of perfection that PTGui can. PTGui is capable of perfect stitching, so long as one uses a very well calibrated pano head, and a prime lens. Stitcher is still prone to slight errors even when calibration is perfect. Stitcher is great for web tours, the slight errors are too small to see a web resolution... but for prints, PTGui can produce superior results thanks to superior control, more blending and output options, and better interpolation.

The catch is this... PTGui can be more complex to use, especially if you want to push it to the limit. Stitcher and PTGui produce similar results in their default modes, so Stitcher's ease of use may be the deciding factor for those who prize simplicity over precision.

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