Exciting Panorama Tool

[JohnFredC]

I just discovered Panorama Perfect.

Honestly, it has the best interface for manually stitching panoramas I have ever encountered. Lots and lots of functionality.

The GUI is crude to look at the functionality is unparalleled IMHO.

Runs in OpenGL.

Free version.

Highly recommended! Wonderful for extremely difficult stitching projects.

[xnview]

Do you have tried AutoPano, works very well...

[JohnFredC]

Hi Pierre

Yes, I use AutoPano most of the time, actually. It's a really amazing tool.

Microsoft ICE also works well (it's entirely automatic, too), but doesn't have the parameter adjustment flexibility of AutoPano.

There are a lot of good panorama tools out there. The famous PanoTools no longer has a monopoly on quality.

However, when there are blurry shadowy overlay problems (for instance as a result of spherical curvature in the camera lens, or parallax issues), control over the individual mapping points (between pairs of images) is essential and Panorama Perfect is the best for that I have found, so far.

For difficult panoramas that resist automatic matching algorithms, most tools require you to actually place the point pairs that need matching into the two images by hand. Though a very precise method, it is also a very tedious one for panoramas with many overlapping pairs of images (some of my panos are 50+ images). Most tools require you to first place the points in the static image pairs, then build the panorama. This iterative process of placing points and building the panorama, placing, building, etc. though ultimately accurate, is slow and labor intensive.

Panorama Perfect uses a combination of transparent overlays, user-controlled mesh warping, and interactive scaling/rotation to "hide" the whole control point mess. Incredibly effective and just the ticket for panoramas that AutoPano has trouble matching cleanly.

[Aokromes]

I love PTGUI

[JohnFredC]

I love PTGUI

I do too, but PP is easier. The mesh warp approach with the ghosted overlays provides more direct feedback and less time to align than the point-pair-by-point-pair placement employed by PTGUI and its clones.

It's as if PP has the first "half" of the PTools processing built directly into the GUI, instead of it being being bundled up in the final "render" with the rest of the processing...

For most of my panos though, AutoPano is the essential tool. It's only the very difficult ones with lots of parallax distortion that need PTGUI or PP.

[oops66]

Personally, I like Hugin ( panorama stitcher + automatic control point generator + more...)
http://hugin.sourceforge.net/
http://hugin.sourceforge.net/tutorials/ ... e/en.shtml

[GeorgD]

To those that are still searching for a stitching program: For over a year, I happily use PanoramaStudio, now version 2.0 Pro - it is one of the cheaper commercial programs, has an outstanding automatic stitching & color matching ability so only very seldomly manual aid is required - and I nearly never use a tripod.... More detailed experience & comparision to other tools here (in German).
Happy stitching, Georg