PowerStitch
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One of the first spherical panoramic image stitchers that could stitch multiple rows of images (in fact any arrangement of rectilinear images). |
See also
Product version: PowerStitch v. 1.0
When you first start Powerstitch you are presented with a blank 3 dimensional canvas. You will position and manipulate your images on this canvas before rendering a view of it and specifying the projection to be used when exporting a flat image.
A set of four "wheels" allow you to pan left/right, pan up/down, roll clockwise or anti-clockwise and zoom in and out. Below you can see that the zoom wheel is highlighted in blue. These wheels provide a very simple way of navigating your way around a sophisticated 3D workspace which could otherwise become confusing.
Once you have loaded your images, set the parameters for them and roughly aligned them, you can use the built-in alignment functions to finish off aligning the images.
Each of the images you are using will appear in the image list. This allows you to see its position and settings. You can lock an image's position, change whether it is displayed or not during editing, etc. Also as you move the mouse across the workspace, a yellow icon appears to the left of the images being manipulated so you can easily keep track of what you are doing.
Probably the first thing you will want to do once you have loaded your images, is select all the images in the image list and set the correct (or at least approximate) focal length.
By right-clicking on an image in the image list you can check its properties...
One catch with aligning images is that if you are not sure of the exact focal length of your images (perhaps because you cropped your images during scanning), then you may need to do several experimental alignments before you will get it right. The online help instructs you that you should first roughly align the images for a 360 degree panorama. If the ends overlap too much the focal length is too short (so the field of view is too great). If the ends don't overlap at all, the focal length is too long (so the field of view is too small). You may therefore need to experiment to find the right settings, but once you are nearly there you can use the "Align full" option to optimise lens settings. However "Align full" optimises the settings for each image separately, and you cannot force it to use the same settings on all.
Multiple undo levels provide plenty of backup if you change a global setting (e.g. FOV of all images) and it all goes wrong.
Once you have finished aligning images you can save your work in a project before rendering. For rendering you can specify either planar (which will give you a composite image that is roughly rectilinear as if you were there) or cylindrical (which incorporates the necessary distortion of a 360 degree scene. In Planar projection you will only be able to save an image that represents approx 120 degrees of the total view. Note that although Powerstitch can create spherical panoramic pictures, it cannot save them in equirectangular format (aka spherical projection) and will therefore the image filesizes will tend to be large for spherical images
You can also set the centre of projection (not in this dialogue but elsewhere) and thereby achieve similar effects as shift lenses when shooting a photograph of a building.
Fortunately the rendering options dialogue gives an estimate of the time to render. Even with small images, Powerstitch is quite slow by comparison to other stitching programs...
Lastly you get to see your picture. In this case this is a cylindrical image for QuickTime VR.
