Spot of trouble here and need your tips please if you have a minute or any ideas. Having travelled in the last three weeks I now have consecutive photos of large open scenery that I want to stitch together to create panorama photos.
Has any of you heard of/used any free such software?
Autopano Giga is worth looking at. Hugin is extremely technical, so that's probably not what you're looking for. If you're using Photoshop, you can import a stack of images into a single row panorama, that's probably your easiest bet if you're using CS2 or above. Lightroom can export a stack straight into Photoshop's panorama stitcher as well, if you're using that program.
Hugin is really incredibly simple, I still don't know quite what @cameronknowlton has against it ;)
It's literally three clicks, click to load the images, click to align the images, click to create the panorama. It couldn't be simpler.
Like Photoshop, it is extremely powerful, so if you want you can configure every aspect of it. But for most people and most photos, the default settings will be perfectly adequate.
I just used it to stitch a 7-image panorama, from starting the program to having the finished panorama file took just under 2 minutes, of which about 10 seconds were me actually doing stuff (loading the files and clicking three buttons), and the rest was it processing.
I tried Hugin with the 70 images below & it could not identify ANY stitching automatically so I did it all manually & it was ununsable. Then I installed Microsoft ICE, drag and drop, and this came out. Hugin is dead to me.
It also integrates with Photosynth (also free) to do 360deg interactive panoramas like this: http://tinyurl.com/b2ax5ov
@cameronknowlton@david68@abirkill I have just started to explore panoramas. I have used to date PS CS6 and it works well for me. The final result in PS is integrated into the whole layers structure and subsequent editing of the result apparently works well, given my limited experience so far.
I have installed Hugin and have had at least as much time with it as the PS CS6 Photomerge. Here are my initial impressions.
There are a lot of moving pieces to Hugin, and the UI is clumsy to expose all of this slap-bang to the beginning user. Seven whole tabs of it! To someone who has designed and built user interfaces for "normal" people for many years, the interface is out of the Windows Dark Ages.
To have the progress of the three stages displayed by detailed running text results from each step is downright frightening to anyone not used to debugging scripts! All this "complexity" exposed - I can't find any options to present it otherwise - might be what Cameron is referring to. Yes, as Alex says, it is just three clicks, two just like PS if you option stitching follow automatically after alignment, but...
I can't see an option for automatic removal of lens distortion and vignetting of source shots as PS has. I would suspect these two problems in the source images are a major cause of "poor stitching" and visible seams. It would be nice for average users not to have to do this editing in each source image, even for 4 or five images, let alone David's 70.
The program has many "perspective" stitching options, many more than PS. I have not read the documentation, but have tried several. The options I have chosen seem to do a comparable job as PS did on several of my collections. At least for horizontal panoramas. I fed a "vertical panorama" to it, and the final product, at least with three of the perspective options I chose, is not as comprehensive as PS was able to do. Also, the batch progress messages were downright frightening with LOTS of "error" indications. Probably due to the inherent vertical perspective issues of tilting the camera?
In the two hours working with it this morning, it did crash once for a reason I can't explain, and another time when I inadvertently tried to "re-enter" the assistant and load a new set without clicking "new." The Norton community report significant crashes and freezes. 32 bit programs running under the WoW services of 64 bit Windows seem somewhat susceptible to this, in my experience.
The "final" viewing I have yet to find out how to show that in the program! Am I just stupid or what? Probably lost in the project viewer somewhere, but it should be obvious or automatic, I would have thought. Of course, navigate to the folder and load it from File Manager or Bridge and it's right there. A nice option to be able to save the result in various formats, tiff being the default it seems.
Notifying Henri Russel, who is beginning to explore panoramas along with me. @henrir Henri, I don't think you need bother with anything than the CS3 you have, but you might find this of interest to recommend to others.
@frankhymus Part of the process of aligning and stitching images automatically compensates for lens distortion. When matching points are detected between images, their relative positions makes an automatic calculation of distortion very easy and extremely precise.
Similarly, the process of blending the images together into a final panorama means that the images are examined for light fall-off patterns, and again this is very easy to accurately correct for.
Hugin, like almost all free and commercial panorama software, performs these corrections automatically. In Hugin, you can see the exact values used for lens distortion correct in the 'Camera and Lens' tab, and for vignetting correction in the 'Exposure' tab.
Photoshop offers the ability to disable these corrections (or it should do, what it actually offers is the ability to enable them, which is bad because for most uses you want them enabled) because the image alignment function in Photoshop can also be used for non-panoramic uses, such as focus stacking or manual HDR blending, where this kind of correction may not be desired.
I can't comment on crashes or error indications with Hugin, as I can't recall seeing any in probably well over 500 panorama stitches I've done with it. Nor has it introduced stitching errors that weren't due to parallax error caused by not using a panoramic head.
As always, one of the most important things with photography is to use equipment (including software) that you like. Personally I find Hugin simple (it doesn't present you with a dialog asking you what layout you want, and with key options unchecked, like Photoshop, it just figures it out) and powerful (if you don't like the defaults it's chosen, you can adjust absolutely any aspect). That's not to say everyone else will. But the key thing is, photography is expensive, and panorama photography is fun. Therefore, I really wouldn't recommend anyone going out and spending serious cash on commercial software to stitch their first panorama, when there are various free options available.
Hey guys and gals! Thank you all for your time and advise on this. Your explanations however seem a bit esoteric to me right now :)
I tried to install either Serif or ICE and after hours I left it. Serif was asking for a code, which I do not have as they did not provide me with it, and ICE brings me up to the point where I have to wait for it to be installed but nothing actually happens!
I am not your IT whizz kid but I never knew I was so challenged! These programs have put a serious dent into my self-esteem. Can anyone help with that :))))?
@frida Sorry, I can't advise much on that. I just installed ICE without any issues, and it's very popular amongst beginners so it's odd that it doesn't install for you :(
@frida, do you use Photoshop? And, do you mind restricting yourself (for now) to single row panoramas? That path will be your easiest. On a Mac, there are a few more alternatives, but Photoshop, Hugin, and AutoPano Giga are the big players on the block, and have gone the furthest in making panoramas accessible to the masses.
Sometimes, Hugin hits it right on the mark. When if doesn't, it requires significant familiarity with the application to get around it. It has a difficult near-vertical learning curve that confuses more non-techies. I've been a computer tech and programmer for over 30 years, and I have little patience for such interfaces... I have better things to do with my time.
However, even the latest v3.0 Autopano Giga requires some learning. Any panorama of more than a few images introduces a lot of complexity to make it work out.
I was working on a 2 row, full 360 degree panorama of Victoria's breakwater the other day. Out of the 24 images (12 per row) that I shot, 1 image is almost devoid of detail... it's a simple shot of water, horizon, and sky.
Hugin completely choked on that one (after trying valiantly to detect the points). Autopano Giga also failed on that one image, but did create a panorama that otherwise looked great... just 1/12th of the ocean and sky was missing.
Both apps require me to now go in and do some triage on the connector points. I'm still learning how to do that. Neither app makes it easy, but AutoPano Giga provides a better interface that encourages exploration.
AutoPano Giga has definitely gone further in bringing panoramas to the masses, but there's no getting around the details and learning curves that are inherent in the process. It's what makes panoramas a unique blend of art and technology.
I'd recommend starting small, do a single row of 3 or 4 images, which will give a better composition than you might imagine. Small panos almost always stitch together well, so Hugin will be much more effective without having to get your hands dirty. You will definitely like HugIn's results, it's stellar when it works.
@frida Oh Bummer, I'm no tech whizz, and it installed ok (without needing a code) Maybe there is a free and a paid version? Serif
Dont give up, computer stuff is like that and from the frustration and confusion comes learning. Its not you :)
Maybe you could do a google search for "free panorama software" and see what comes up.
Best advice is not to get frustrated and keep trying. Good luck :)
@abirkill Agree that Pano is great fun, and that Photoshop is expensive. And that Hugin is really quite simple to use once you get over the intimidation aspect and the antique UI. The different projections are really comprehensive. I have to find the best one for vertical stacks of 5-6 shots with increasing camera tilt and subsequent vertical perspective "apparent" distortions. PS "default" does a much better job on such sets than the 3 or 4 I have tried so far. Recommendations?
@frida, No problem installing and running Hugin. try it, you might like it!
@cameronknowlton@abirkill@david68 Looking for reasons for the crashes and problems of hugin, there are horrendous cumulative memory leaks on Windows 7 64 bit, what is on my laptop. It only takes Task Manager to see this.
And David, I suspect that your 70 image effort floundered immediately with the memory management of WoW and the 32 bit tools and compilers apparently used by the developer. At least for Windows.
That would make sense. I am running x64 Win8. I tried compatibility mode but it made not difference. Still, ICE does everything I need in less than 1 minute even with 70 images so I am happy now.
@cameronknowlton If you have an image without any distinguishing features, trying to add control points is usually just going to make things worse. Unless you get them perfect (and without distinguishing features, that's unlikely), it'll cause the stitcher to think your lens was having a bad day and try and correct for all sorts of distortion that doesn't exist (and sometimes pull the rest of the panorama out of shape, too).
Usually the easiest way to deal with images without detail (short of using a motorised head to take the images, which is how it really should be done) is to just fudge the numbers. Usually you only need to get the image roughly in the right place, as blending will do the rest.
In Hugin, it will already have linked the images so that the lens parameters (distortion, vignetting correction) have been applied to the image it couldn't match -- these are typically the same for all images in a pano, unless you were zooming or altering the aperture between photos.
You can therefore go straight to the images tab and find the image that wouldn't stitch. You want to enter custom yaw, pitch and roll values for it -- this simply determines where the image is located in the panorama. Usually the bad image will have other images either side of it that have stitched OK, so it's really just a case of picking the middle value -- for example, if the image on one side has a yaw value of 3.5, and the image on the other side has a yaw value of 5.5, then you give the 'bad' image a yaw value of 4.5 -- and the same for pitch and roll.
You might need to do some finer adjustments, especially if you didn't take your photos with particularly even gaps between them, but by doing small preview panoramas to check your progress, it doesn't take long -- it usually takes me 2-10 minutes to get an image position correctly relative to the others -- whereas you can spend hours messing around with control points and going slightly mad.
Most decent configurable pano software has the ability to position images directly like this for exactly this kind of reason, I'm sure Autopano Giga does as well, if you prefer to use that.
Edit: After wondering whether any pano software allowed you to simply drag the bad image into the right place, I did some Googling and discovered Hugin does allow that! In the preview window, go to the Move/Drag tab, select drag mode 'normal, individual', select the checkbox of the image you want to manually position, and simply move it to the right place. That's going to make my super-huge panos so much easier!
@frankhymus, keep in mind that RAM isn't the only commodity at issue here. Hard drive space, processors, and file size are also limiting factors.
A laptop will tend to have fewer processors, less RAM, and will run slower than tower computers... Laptops have a battery power mandate to maintain, remember, as well as expensive economies of space.
Techies like @abirkill and me tend to have very high powered iron... gamers enjoy the same advantage, so think gaming systems when it comes to panoramas, and you're heading in the right direction.
Even my 3.2GHz 16GB, quad core Mac Pro with hyperthreading slows down with a 24 image panorama off my 24MP Nikon D600.
So, by extension, a 70 panorama off a 2MP Canon MKIII is definitely hitting one of those barriers.
@david68, try a much smaller pano. Check your free space on your hard drive as well, especially *during* the render. Always use LZW compression for your TIFF (it's linear, so works better for massive files). However, keep in mind that your temp files probably won't be compressed, so you're going to need a LOT of free storage space.
One of Hugin's (and AutoPano Giga's) strengths on a Mac (or any Unix machine) is that they're Unix based, so they're capable of dealing with the MASSIVE objects that you're working with in panoramic photography. Windows (and the Mac side of OS X) don't like going much past 2GB for a file, and any system will freak out if it runs out of free storage space.
That said, I'm heading out the door to pick up my two internal 2TB SATA hard drives for a mere $135 each. Storage is dirt cheap now, if you're doing panos, go buy some more.
Thank you @abirkill, I'm looking forward to trying out your great ideas in Hugin. I use a gimbal pano head, and I shot each frame at exact 30 degree marks. Your averaging idea is brilliant, I'll try that and see if it makes my skewed image any better.
@cameronknowlton No worries -- see my edit at the bottom of my previous post -- I've just found a way that makes it so much easier and is gonna save me tons of time!
@cameronknowlton I shot the photos in RAW & then ran it through Lightroom & exported them all as 800x600 @240dpi making approx. 500kb individual images. I have 8Gb i5 Quad core 3.1Ghz box so it is not a slug. I really think it should have managed it from a resources POV. I am prepared to accept that x64 and or Win8 could have been factors that could be addressed in future versions of Hugin but for whatever reason, for now, for me, it is not an option.
@david68 I stitched my recent 519 megapixel HDR pano (190 full-res 16-bit TIFFs from a 5D3) with Hugin and while it took a while it worked (and the time taken was as nothing compared to the time taken for each step of post-processing in Photoshop)
I don't actually have a super-fast modern machine, I have a 3 year old laptop!
I tried ICE this afternoon and it failed to stitch two out of three simple panos (big overlaps, very strong matching features), as it couldn't find matching points -- so for me it's not an option. But as I said earlier, the best tool is the one you like using.
@cameronknowlton Well OK. But It is not RAM per se that I was getting at, but the MANAGEMENT of RAM in the application code. As I am sure you understand if you have done any programming in Windows especially lately. This application, Hugin, shows its age.
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I havent had any problems with it.
:)
It's literally three clicks, click to load the images, click to align the images, click to create the panorama. It couldn't be simpler.
Like Photoshop, it is extremely powerful, so if you want you can configure every aspect of it. But for most people and most photos, the default settings will be perfectly adequate.
I just used it to stitch a 7-image panorama, from starting the program to having the finished panorama file took just under 2 minutes, of which about 10 seconds were me actually doing stuff (loading the files and clicking three buttons), and the rest was it processing.
Another free option is Microsoft ICE:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ice/
Which is probably even simpler than Hugin, but not as powerful.
As mentioned, Photoshop also offers basic stitching, although not as powerful as Hugin or ICE. It's worth a try though if you already have it.
I'm sure Autopano Giga is excellent at what it does, but with a few good free options available, I'd be very reluctant to spend $300 on it.
It also integrates with Photosynth (also free) to do 360deg interactive panoramas like this: http://tinyurl.com/b2ax5ov
I have installed Hugin and have had at least as much time with it as the PS CS6 Photomerge. Here are my initial impressions.
There are a lot of moving pieces to Hugin, and the UI is clumsy to expose all of this slap-bang to the beginning user. Seven whole tabs of it! To someone who has designed and built user interfaces for "normal" people for many years, the interface is out of the Windows Dark Ages.
To have the progress of the three stages displayed by detailed running text results from each step is downright frightening to anyone not used to debugging scripts! All this "complexity" exposed - I can't find any options to present it otherwise - might be what Cameron is referring to. Yes, as Alex says, it is just three clicks, two just like PS if you option stitching follow automatically after alignment, but...
I can't see an option for automatic removal of lens distortion and vignetting of source shots as PS has. I would suspect these two problems in the source images are a major cause of "poor stitching" and visible seams. It would be nice for average users not to have to do this editing in each source image, even for 4 or five images, let alone David's 70.
The program has many "perspective" stitching options, many more than PS. I have not read the documentation, but have tried several. The options I have chosen seem to do a comparable job as PS did on several of my collections. At least for horizontal panoramas. I fed a "vertical panorama" to it, and the final product, at least with three of the perspective options I chose, is not as comprehensive as PS was able to do. Also, the batch progress messages were downright frightening with LOTS of "error" indications. Probably due to the inherent vertical perspective issues of tilting the camera?
In the two hours working with it this morning, it did crash once for a reason I can't explain, and another time when I inadvertently tried to "re-enter" the assistant and load a new set without clicking "new." The Norton community report significant crashes and freezes. 32 bit programs running under the WoW services of 64 bit Windows seem somewhat susceptible to this, in my experience.
The "final" viewing I have yet to find out how to show that in the program! Am I just stupid or what? Probably lost in the project viewer somewhere, but it should be obvious or automatic, I would have thought. Of course, navigate to the folder and load it from File Manager or Bridge and it's right there. A nice option to be able to save the result in various formats, tiff being the default it seems.
Notifying Henri Russel, who is beginning to explore panoramas along with me. @henrir Henri, I don't think you need bother with anything than the CS3 you have, but you might find this of interest to recommend to others.
ICE I have zero experience with.
Similarly, the process of blending the images together into a final panorama means that the images are examined for light fall-off patterns, and again this is very easy to accurately correct for.
Hugin, like almost all free and commercial panorama software, performs these corrections automatically. In Hugin, you can see the exact values used for lens distortion correct in the 'Camera and Lens' tab, and for vignetting correction in the 'Exposure' tab.
Photoshop offers the ability to disable these corrections (or it should do, what it actually offers is the ability to enable them, which is bad because for most uses you want them enabled) because the image alignment function in Photoshop can also be used for non-panoramic uses, such as focus stacking or manual HDR blending, where this kind of correction may not be desired.
I can't comment on crashes or error indications with Hugin, as I can't recall seeing any in probably well over 500 panorama stitches I've done with it. Nor has it introduced stitching errors that weren't due to parallax error caused by not using a panoramic head.
As always, one of the most important things with photography is to use equipment (including software) that you like. Personally I find Hugin simple (it doesn't present you with a dialog asking you what layout you want, and with key options unchecked, like Photoshop, it just figures it out) and powerful (if you don't like the defaults it's chosen, you can adjust absolutely any aspect). That's not to say everyone else will. But the key thing is, photography is expensive, and panorama photography is fun. Therefore, I really wouldn't recommend anyone going out and spending serious cash on commercial software to stitch their first panorama, when there are various free options available.
Hey guys and gals! Thank you all for your time and advise on this. Your explanations however seem a bit esoteric to me right now :)
I tried to install either Serif or ICE and after hours I left it. Serif was asking for a code, which I do not have as they did not provide me with it, and ICE brings me up to the point where I have to wait for it to be installed but nothing actually happens!
I am not your IT whizz kid but I never knew I was so challenged! These programs have put a serious dent into my self-esteem. Can anyone help with that :))))?
Sometimes, Hugin hits it right on the mark. When if doesn't, it requires significant familiarity with the application to get around it. It has a difficult near-vertical learning curve that confuses more non-techies. I've been a computer tech and programmer for over 30 years, and I have little patience for such interfaces... I have better things to do with my time.
However, even the latest v3.0 Autopano Giga requires some learning. Any panorama of more than a few images introduces a lot of complexity to make it work out.
I was working on a 2 row, full 360 degree panorama of Victoria's breakwater the other day. Out of the 24 images (12 per row) that I shot, 1 image is almost devoid of detail... it's a simple shot of water, horizon, and sky.
Hugin completely choked on that one (after trying valiantly to detect the points). Autopano Giga also failed on that one image, but did create a panorama that otherwise looked great... just 1/12th of the ocean and sky was missing.
Both apps require me to now go in and do some triage on the connector points. I'm still learning how to do that. Neither app makes it easy, but AutoPano Giga provides a better interface that encourages exploration.
AutoPano Giga has definitely gone further in bringing panoramas to the masses, but there's no getting around the details and learning curves that are inherent in the process. It's what makes panoramas a unique blend of art and technology.
I'd recommend starting small, do a single row of 3 or 4 images, which will give a better composition than you might imagine. Small panos almost always stitch together well, so Hugin will be much more effective without having to get your hands dirty. You will definitely like HugIn's results, it's stellar when it works.
Dont give up, computer stuff is like that and from the frustration and confusion comes learning. Its not you :)
Maybe you could do a google search for "free panorama software" and see what comes up.
Best advice is not to get frustrated and keep trying. Good luck :)
@frida, No problem installing and running Hugin. try it, you might like it!
And David, I suspect that your 70 image effort floundered immediately with the memory management of WoW and the 32 bit tools and compilers apparently used by the developer. At least for Windows.
Usually the easiest way to deal with images without detail (short of using a motorised head to take the images, which is how it really should be done) is to just fudge the numbers. Usually you only need to get the image roughly in the right place, as blending will do the rest.
In Hugin, it will already have linked the images so that the lens parameters (distortion, vignetting correction) have been applied to the image it couldn't match -- these are typically the same for all images in a pano, unless you were zooming or altering the aperture between photos.
You can therefore go straight to the images tab and find the image that wouldn't stitch. You want to enter custom yaw, pitch and roll values for it -- this simply determines where the image is located in the panorama. Usually the bad image will have other images either side of it that have stitched OK, so it's really just a case of picking the middle value -- for example, if the image on one side has a yaw value of 3.5, and the image on the other side has a yaw value of 5.5, then you give the 'bad' image a yaw value of 4.5 -- and the same for pitch and roll.
You might need to do some finer adjustments, especially if you didn't take your photos with particularly even gaps between them, but by doing small preview panoramas to check your progress, it doesn't take long -- it usually takes me 2-10 minutes to get an image position correctly relative to the others -- whereas you can spend hours messing around with control points and going slightly mad.
Most decent configurable pano software has the ability to position images directly like this for exactly this kind of reason, I'm sure Autopano Giga does as well, if you prefer to use that.
Edit: After wondering whether any pano software allowed you to simply drag the bad image into the right place, I did some Googling and discovered Hugin does allow that! In the preview window, go to the Move/Drag tab, select drag mode 'normal, individual', select the checkbox of the image you want to manually position, and simply move it to the right place. That's going to make my super-huge panos so much easier!
A laptop will tend to have fewer processors, less RAM, and will run slower than tower computers... Laptops have a battery power mandate to maintain, remember, as well as expensive economies of space.
Techies like @abirkill and me tend to have very high powered iron... gamers enjoy the same advantage, so think gaming systems when it comes to panoramas, and you're heading in the right direction.
Even my 3.2GHz 16GB, quad core Mac Pro with hyperthreading slows down with a 24 image panorama off my 24MP Nikon D600.
So, by extension, a 70 panorama off a 2MP Canon MKIII is definitely hitting one of those barriers.
@david68, try a much smaller pano. Check your free space on your hard drive as well, especially *during* the render. Always use LZW compression for your TIFF (it's linear, so works better for massive files). However, keep in mind that your temp files probably won't be compressed, so you're going to need a LOT of free storage space.
One of Hugin's (and AutoPano Giga's) strengths on a Mac (or any Unix machine) is that they're Unix based, so they're capable of dealing with the MASSIVE objects that you're working with in panoramic photography. Windows (and the Mac side of OS X) don't like going much past 2GB for a file, and any system will freak out if it runs out of free storage space.
That said, I'm heading out the door to pick up my two internal 2TB SATA hard drives for a mere $135 each. Storage is dirt cheap now, if you're doing panos, go buy some more.
I don't actually have a super-fast modern machine, I have a 3 year old laptop!
I tried ICE this afternoon and it failed to stitch two out of three simple panos (big overlaps, very strong matching features), as it couldn't find matching points -- so for me it's not an option. But as I said earlier, the best tool is the one you like using.