AutoStitch

I realize that you get what you pay for, and the price of AutoStitch
(free)
was certainly right. I did a 180 degree pan of my back yard in 7 shots.
Each
shot individually was sharp, the stitching process was flawless, but the
resulting picture was somewhat fuzzy. Does anyone know of a solution for
this problem using the available options, or is fuzzy as good as it gets
with this software? If the latter, can someone suggest a reasonably priced
alternative. The photo's were taken with a Fuji E550 at 3 megapixels in
auto
mode.

I've only seen any fuzziness out of Autostitch on a couple of shots, and
each time it's been when there was no way to resolve differences between
shots - in one, a tree had been moved by the wind, in another, a dog had
lifted her head. There are some parameters you can play with (which are
briefly discussed in the readme file that came with it), but differences of
that nature just aren't resolvable.

The shorter the focal length (and hence, wider the angle) of your shot,
the more distortion you introduce around the edges - and the more difficult
it will be for Autostitch to do a good job. More shots at a slightly longer
focal length may help. I got up on my roof with a tripod and made a
180-degree panorama of my neighborhood, but I took something like 27
pictures to do it (roughly a 3x9 grid). The resultant image - AFTER
CROPPING - was around 150 megapixels. It took a while to process, but
there's a ton of detail, and when resized to a more reasonable level for
printing, any aberrations from the stitching process will be much less
visible.

steve

"There's a freeware version of The Panorama Factory that has none of
these problems."

With Panorama Factory you can get mostly pretty good results but With
Hugin (equipped with Panotools and Autopano) you can get even much
better results.

http://hugin.sourceforge.net/


Markku Virtanen

One thing You could try is to decrease the feather width even to zero.
Please read more he

http://enblend.sourceforge.net/


Markku Virtanen

"Markku V." wrote...
One thing You could try is to decrease the feather width even to zero.
Please read more he
http://enblend.sourceforge.net/

Thanks. I tried the zero feather width but it doesn't seem to make a
noticable difference in hiding the seams; especially in the sky. I replaced
the first pano with the zero feather version at the same URL:
http://www.justus.ca/misc/panoramas.htm Any other suggestions? Paul's post
suggested that I try Enblend but I thought that was automatic, as I've
explained in the reply to his post.

Here You can find somewhat more information about using Enblend with
Hugin:

http://rbpark.ath.cx/articles/create.html


Markku Virtanen

"Markku V." wrote...
Here You can find somewhat more information about using Enblend with
Hugin:
http://rbpark.ath.cx/articles/create.html

Thanks for your patience Markku. I did get Enblend to stitch the panorama
by following the "One Guy With Camera" instructions that you recommended.
Enblend does do an excellent job of blending but I still have one problem.
When I try to output the multiple Tiff files using Hugin, the files are
created OK but immediately after the final file is processed by Hugin they
all get automatically deleted. The only way that I could get the files for
Enblend to process was by copying the files to a separate directory, one by
one as they were completed by Hugin. I still could not get the last file
because it gets deleted immediately after processing and there's no time to
copy it. I also tried selecting the "Tiff" output with the Soft Blending
option from within Hugin but Enblend crashes during the processing with an
error message saying that Hugin gave it only a single file to process. Do
you have any ideas on how to avoid this problem with the files getting
automatically deleted? I guess Hugin is doing the deleting because Enblend
is not even running at that point.

I think there is a bug somewhere cocerning this procedure. I just tried
the same thing and it happened just like You said: the tif -files are
deleted right after they are made ready.

But when I used PTStitcher instead of nona engine everything went fine.


Markku Virtanen

Mardon wrote:
"Markku V." wrote...

I think there is a bug somewhere cocerning this procedure. I just tried
the same thing and it happened just like You said: the tif -files are
deleted right after they are made ready.
But when I used PTStitcher instead of nona engine everything went fine.


I just happened to stumble across the answer. The "Delete remapped tiff
files" check box on the Enblend tab of the Hugin Prefences menu item has to
be unchecked. Doing so stopped the automatic deletion problem. Thanks for
your help.


I just select tif output and end up with a final file that does not need
to be joined.
An example (low res) is at www.paulbech.id.au/photos/museum.jpg

Paul wrote in
:


I just select tif output and end up with a final file that does not need
to be joined.
An example (low res) is at www.paulbech.id.au/photos/museum.jpg

I made first 'Multiple TIFF' files with PTStitcher (with 'exposure
correction' and with 'feather width' value zero) from five jpg -pics. Then
I opened those five tif -files to a new project and used nona with 'Soft
Blending' to get one panorama picture (tif -file).

Here you can see the result:

http://members.tiscali.fi/markkvi/Panorama/Page.html

At least there are no visible seams in the sky nor anywhere else. I admit
that the sky is not very good at all but that is mostly caused by quite
heavy JPEG -compressing.

Markku Virtanen