I love digital photography and I love panoramas even more. There is just no way to get the same feeling with one shot wide angle or not that you can get by stitching several images together. When you are trying to show and create the same awe that you feel as you stand their looking out at the wide open visit, structure or what not and you want to create that same feeling in your image then a panorama is the way to go. Panoramas are to photography what an IMAX theater screen is to a movie buff.
I seldom go out and take pictures without shooting at least several panoramas and of those 99% of them are 6 or few shots. I find going much wider than 6 shots that they become to large to do much with. A 40000 pixel wide panorama is very hard to view on screen and can be even more of a problem to print especially since most printers don’t support roll paper. Basically, when I shoot a panorama I am trying to create a wider than normal view of the scene. Wider than I can get with even the widest wide angle lens (which my camera doesn’t support, it has a fixed lens). Basically, when shooting a panorama I am trying to recreate the same field of view I had while there looking at the scene. Basically what the human eyes sees from side to side without having to turn the body or the head. Sure there are uses for large panoramas like for 360 degree ones for showing off the inside of a home or other building. But, for scenes going wider than 6 shots at least for me causes a great deal of loss in the awe factor of the image. I guess to me there is just too much to take in and so none of it gets appreciated very much.
TIP: If you wan to shoot wider panoramas then shoot all of your pictures and then create smaller panoramas from them. Say 4 for a full 360 degree view. This way you get the full view but you get panoramas that are easier to use, easier to see and easier to appreciate.
Now I am not going to go in to the techniques I use to shoot panoramas. There is tons of information on the internet about this and the chances are the software you use to stitch your images together is going to have this kind of information as well. This is after all a review of a panorama stitching program. A review of what I consider to be the best stitching program currently available. PTgui, the current version is 5.6 and it is a remarkable program.
Basically, in PTgui there are three steps to creating a stitched panorama.
- Load your images and if needed rotate them to the proper orientation.
- Create the control points that the software will use to align the images.
- Stitch the images together creating your panorama.
For loading your images PTgui offers the basic open dialog box, you can change the view to thumbnail view to make finding your images easier. Once you have found them and have loaded them in to PTgui you can rotate the images if needed to get them to the proper orientation. It is also at this time that PTgui tries to use the EXIF data in the image (placed there by your camera) to set the lens settings and such. If the data isn’t there it will then ask you to supply it. While most of today’s digital cameras record the EXIF information and place it within each image some editing programs can strip the EXIF data out (shame on them for doing this), this data is important to keep and should not be lost. There for I always recommend that you work on copies of your images and not the originals. Other wise providing the information that PTgui needs for the lens information can be difficult or impossible because the chances are you don’t know the information either. In the event that the EXIF information wasn’t created (older cameras) or it was lost do to editing you can either enter the numbers yourself (if you know them) or you can take a best guess and just click the button that matches the lens setting you took the picture with, you can choose wide angle, normal or zoom. While this isn’t the best thing it does work. Having the EXIF data is the best option.
The second step is generating the control points. The control points help PTgui find matching material in each of the images so that it can overlap them. The control points are the number one most important thing for stitching panoramas with PTgui and many other programs. Taking the time to do this right (if you don’t have PTgui do it all for you) is very important. Without it or if not done correctly you will either not be able to stitch the images together or they will not stitch correctly. For this step you can have PTgui place the control points for you. Or, you can place them yourself with PTgui providing on screen help or if you don’t need the on screen help you can do it all by yourself. I have yet to find a set of images that PTgui couldn’t place the control points on and do a good job, the only time PTgui may have problems is if the images you have chosen are not in the proper order or if they are not of the same subject. I tend to allow PTgui to do the control points for me. Keep in mind by adding control points manually to images that are not part of a series you can end up with some very interesting montage effects.
The third step is putting the panorama together. It is in this step that you decide how large the panorama will be (pixel dimensions), what file format it will be saved in (TIF, JPG, PSD, PSB), how the layers are handled for example just save the blended panorama only, or individual layers or blended and layers. If you choose the layers or blended and layers this allows you to tweak the stitching process in a program like Photoshop which can be handy. Finally you choose the output filename and directory. Then you click the create panorama button and then wait for PTgui to do its thing.
Now these three steps are just the basics. PTgui has a lot of manual controls that gives you complete control over the Panorama creation process. So far I have found that 99% of the panoramas I have done PTgui has done without any problems what so ever. In fact I think based on my testing of other stitching programs that PTgui is the best one available and by far does the best job with stitching images together full automatically.
However, there are times when one will have a set of images that just won’t go quietly in to that stitching night. It is for these images that you will use the manual controls.
Even when you have PTgui does the work for you, you get some manual controls, for example when you add control points automatically you get a dialog box after PTgui has done its work that allows you to edit individual images (incase of alignment problems) or the entire panorama (this is before it is stitched). You can also set the type of projection including rectilinear, cylindrical or equirectangular.
When using the control point assistant (semi-automatic) PTgui pops up on screen help to guide you. That is what makes the control point assistant different from the manual control point function. In both of these modes you can rotate the images, zoom them to make adding control points easier, link the images together so that as you move and zoom one image the next image does the same, this makes matching the placement of the control points much easier. Because when you place a control point in say image 1 you need to place a control point in the same exact place in image two. This is how PTgui knows where and how to align the images. This all sounds more complex than it is. Trust me it is easy even when you have to place the control points yourself.
Everything you do is done using a tabbed interface that is clean and easy to understand. While PTgui for several versions now has been able to do most things on its own, it still allows you to use plug-ins. You can use Autopano which is a control point generator plug-in; you can use Emblend and Smartblend for blending the separate images of the panorama together. Do you need the plug-ins? Not that I have found. However, they are there as an option. It is important to understand that the plug-ins are not done by the makers of PTgui. They are done by other people and for the most part they are open source and free. Do they do a better job? Maybe, I can’t say as I have never tried them, think of them as something to experiment with.
Oh, one last thing. If you are like me and shoot images for several panoramas you will love PTgui's batch stitching capabilities. This enables you to do all of the grunt work and then have PTgui stitch all of your panoramas together while you do something else. It is a real time saver.
Overall PTgui is both easy to use with its project assistant and powerful with plenty of semi-automatic and manual controls. PTgui can stitch together images shot horizontally or vertically and it can create panoramas that include both horizontal and vertical images (tiled panoramas). For example on my last trip to the Marin Headlands ( Northern California) I wanted to take a picture of one of the old gun batteries. However, since I couldn’t move back far enough from the battery to get the entire thing in one shot (there was a cliff behind me). I shot a series of six shots three for the top part (left to right) and three for the bottom part (left to right) then I had PTgui stitch them all together in to one large complete image of the gun battery. So don’t think you are limited to just wide panoramas you can do tall ones and tiled ones as well. Tall ones are great for buildings, waterfalls and other tall things. The tiled ones, well I gave you an example of why you want to use them. However, there is another reason tiled panoramas are nice. By combining in my case 6 images I ended up with a final image much larger and higher in resolution than my 8MP camera could have created taking the picture with just one shot. So if you need to do large poster prints of something a tiled image can give you the size and resolution you need to print large and at high resolution.
I highly recommend PTgui. It does an incredible job of stitching, blending and adjusting exposures across the images so that you end up with one continuous and harmonious image. It just doesn’t get much better or easier.
