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Photo panorama creation

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Carol Haynes:
Thought I'd show off a panorama I took the other day. All three images are thumbnails - click on them to see the full image.

This is a picture of Wensleydale looking south (the East end of my village is at the left hand end of the the photo)

To give a bit of background:

12 large/fine JPEG quality photos taken left to right with a Canon EOS Rebel (300D)
Hand held (yes I know ideally I should use a tripod but it was a spare of the moment decision)

I tried three different applications on basic settings (just whacked in the photos and used all the default settings):

This was the best image I got - and I am really quite impressed:

Photo panorama creation

Note the original image created is 11Mb so this is significantly reduced in size (and it shows a bit). The software I used for this image was PTGui (latest build) (cost 65 Euros). There is also a very active forum where the author contributes a lot (which is based on the original PanoTools).

Other applications I tried were Panorama Factory (latest version, $70) and PanaVue Image Assembler (version 2.12a - current version is 3, $64-$129) and Autostitch (free beta version - time limited, available in other commercial products at a price).

Panorama Factory had distinct areas of non-alignment (in various places trees on the skyline appeared as elongated blobs because they appeared more than once but not quite in the same place). It produced a file of 24.5Mb. Here is a small version of the output file:

Photo panorama creation

I haven't upgraded to the latest version of PanaVue Image Assembler because it seems hard to justify the price ($32 for the upgrade) when I originally swapped to Panorama Factory because of marginally better results. Version 2 produced an image with a slight bend, misalignments and some colour banding at overlaps. It produced a file of 20.1Mb. Here is a small version:

Photo panorama creation

Autostitch ... produced a 24.9Mb file with good alignment. It is hard to tell but I personally think the image is a little more banded at the original pictures overlap areas than in PTGui - but for free it produces a good result - plus it is the easiest to use - you can add any set of photos (in any order) and it sorts out the positions of the all photos even if there are multiple rows and the pics are not straight without any further user input.

Photo panorama creation

This is a very unscientific test really - one stitching job on default settings is hardly good practice - but then I was really impressed with the accuracy and colour matching of PTGui.

If anyone is interested I could do a little review and try to identify (and zoom in on) some of the problem areas. I could try PanaVue version 3 too (using the demo version).

Darwin:
This is really interesting, Carol. I'd be interested in seeing a minireview of these apps. You could add Autostitch (http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html), or one or more of the apps that are based on its code to round out the review...

mouser:
panorma app review!
panorma app review!
panorma app review!

Carol Haynes:
OK I'll get onto it ...

Anyone got other apps for this they would like covered (but only if they have a free or properly working demo version)?

Carol Haynes:
Added an 'Autostitch' section to the first post.

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