Destiny,

If I have a car move through a scene I creating a pano of, I'll paint an Aplha channel on each frame over the offending item. Then as the next frame overlaps the previous frame it will cover the painted out area and there will be no holes in my pano.

My reason for asking is that now I have a scene with a boat passing through a pano and I want to preserve the boat and it's wake throughout the pano.

My way of comphrending this is like an inverted Alpha channel. It may be incorrect, but it you can help it would be great, thanks.

Kind regards,

Niall

niall_eidw wrote:

Greetings,

I consider my to be reasonably capable user of APG. I have used the 'Alpha Channel' in PS4 in my individaul images before opening them in APG.

Can somebody please help me as to how I can INCLUDE recurring data in my frames, like an inverted Alpha Channel.

Kind regards,

Niall

autopano 3.0 alpha 1 has a new "antighoast"/masking feature. Just load the unedited images with all ghosts into autopano. and use than the "Mask Edition" tool to point on that object you want to remove. To make this tool working its needed that there's a overlapping area where the ghost exists. so one image with ghost is overlapping on the ghostares a second image having no ghost...

your method with the masking is also working. You need also verlapping areas so the alphas masks can be filled with parts of the unmasked images... here you can optimize by manually adding / deleting CPs in autopano, shown like in this manual:
http://www.kolor.com/forum/t6821-editin … op?id=6821

about autopano 3 alpha 1 and the ghost masking tool you can see here in the video "watch what’s new in Autopano 3.0" around Min 3:00 "the selective antighost"
http://www.kolor.com/blog-en/2012/06/14 … available/

for a optimized workflow... I allways take into consideration to shoot multiple images at the same image position (with same camera settings)
so I can use the images to reduce noise (oloneo tool and others) or you can use the images for perfect ghostremoval... 3 images shot with 2-3 sec. pause than cars, walking persons etc. can perfectly removed if needed. Ok. on very busy places, like time square, statiums etc. this method does not work....

Liebe Gruesse,
Georg

Last edited by gkaefer (2012-08-09 14:36:24)

Georg,

Thank you very much for your URLs, it was the masking method you identified that enabled me to mask out using the Alpha channel.

I know that theres a way, not sure if you saw last years Panobook, but there was a pano with a parachuteist in it on a mountain slope. I suppose this is what I'm trying to do.

APG 3.0 A1 will have a very cool masking feature. It's always the way, when you need somthing. Its in the next version!! ;-)

I'll keep looking...

Thanks again,

Niall

Destiny,

I do use TIFFs, I'm using 8 Bit TIFFs each file being about 64MB. I tried using the 'Masking' feature in APG 3 but it's not selecting  the correct area in the pano.

My pano has about 50 images and every time I use the mask, even with the image selected in the Layers, the mask continually shows itself to be at the exact same location.

I'm a little reluctatnt to do too much in 3.x as I can't save it. So I'll continue to look for a solution with 2.6 (ruinning ona  MAC)

With the little experience of 3.0 I ahve the rendering engine makes much better use of system resources.

Regards,

Niall

niall_eidw wrote:

Destiny,

If I have a car move through a scene I creating a pano of, I'll paint an Aplha channel on each frame over the offending item. Then as the next frame overlaps the previous frame it will cover the painted out area and there will be no holes in my pano.

My reason for asking is that now I have a scene with a boat passing through a pano and I want to preserve the boat and it's wake throughout the pano.

My way of comphrending this is like an inverted Alpha channel. It may be incorrect, but it you can help it would be great, thanks.

Kind regards,

Niall

Hi Niall!

Given you have enough overlap - in Photoshop: double the layer, delete the background-layer, erase the boat and save the image as .png.
That´s all.

You also can render the pano as layers, import them into Photoshop and then do your editing on the layer containing the redundant boat.

best, Klaus

I used .png here:

http://www.360impressions.de/ArchivTausendf/

besides of the first pano - which i shot in the late evening - literally everything on the site was in movement: cranes (which gave me some headache), workers, cars, trucks and so on.
So i had to erase dozens of crane-ghosts, worker-ghosts, car-ghosts, truck-ghosts. There maybe the one or the other minor errors left - (with some hundreds of images to stitch and 700MPx
of each pano maybe not too much of a surprise . . to judge that one has to do it at least once on a similar location and with the same resolution . . )

Basically it makes no difference whether you do it before stitching - here i used .png for saving as said - or whether you do it after having rendered the pano as layers and edit the layers in Photoshop.
The latter gives you some more visual control while editing.

Usually i use 16bit/tif.

best, Klaus

Klaus...a 24 bit PNG being a Portable Network Graphic with highly optimised colour depth but has the benefits of the alpa channel, which can look fine on screen but an 8 bit TIF has far superior depth of colour. As a consequence the TIF file size will be far bigger due to the true colour depth. A 16bit TIF is an over kill where the file size will be far too big. A 16bit TIF is more suitable for print medium even at RGB. The 8 bit TIF is a bit different to the way colour is used in comparison to a jpg or png, since the 8 bit TIF assigns 3 bits to the red, 3 bits to the green and 2 bits to the blue.

The final optimised images used for a VR would be better suited to jpg's since they allow for lossy....

Destiny...

So, as a photographer, could you please explain why you would be using a 16bit TIF and the benefits of using them... ??
Am I to assume you are using these for print... ??

One of the main reasons why I want ptp to export the entire pano after fixing up the nadir footprint is to print it.. If I could export I would then use 16bit TIF format...

Destiny

klausesser wrote:

Destiny wrote:

Klaus...a 24 bit PNG being a Portable Network Graphic with highly optimised colour depth but has the benefits of the alpa channel, which can look fine on screen but an 8 bit TIF has far superior depth of colour. As a consequence the TIF file size will be far bigger due to the true colour depth. A 16bit TIF is an over kill where the file size will be far too big. A 16bit TIF is more suitable for print medium even at RGB. The 8 bit TIF is a bit different to the way colour is used in comparison to a jpg or png, since the 8 bit TIF assigns 3 bits to the red, 3 bits to the green and 2 bits to the blue.
The final optimised images used for a VR would be better suited to jpg's since they allow for lossy....

Destiny...

Destiny - you´re talking to a photographer . .

Klaus

Last edited by Destiny (2012-08-12 02:46:28)

hermer-blr wrote:

To Niall

The only deterministic way I have found to deal with ghosts is to use the demo version of PTGUI. With it you can accurately control the ghosts that you want to delete and the holes that you need to make in order to keep the moving features you want in the image. PTGUI (in its demo version) allows to export the masks that you generate when dealing with the ghosts. Then, use those masks with Gimp or photoshop in order to create the holes in your pictures.

You are then ready to perform your panorama stitching with Autopano.

The process may seem a bit lengthy, but it works in a perfect deterministic way. I used it to stitch panoramas made in New-York (the town which never sleeps) and I am really happy with the result. I have tried APG 3.0 but (maybe due to the fact that my panoramas are all bracketed) I have not been satisfied by the result and given up using the deghosting...

Good luck

hermer-blr,

Thanks for your assistance. I need to look into PTGUI and probably CS4 too...

I took a look at your website and your work is beautiful, congratuations.

BTW you URL in your signature has a typo!!

Kind regards,

Niall