Aeriscera wrote:

I am particularly interested to hear from people who are into multiple gigapixel panos and/or hdr/tone-mapped panos.
A

I also take an interest in the PTGui forum, and AFAIK PTGUi now has some built-in support for exposure fusion but it has no direct support at all for gigapixel panos; unlike APP/APG which has direct support for gigapixel panos hot with a variety of robotic pano head which enables the placement of 'featureless' images, which as you will well know are common when shooting gigapixel panos with long focal length lenses, which would otherwise remain 'orphaned'.

Last edited by mediavets (2010-05-27 16:40:58)

There is some good and bad in both application

We try to improve what is missing in APG to get the best in a single application :

* "Very good is the manual "wysiwyg" cp-editing in PTGui. That would be fine to have in APG." => we're doing that. Available end June.
* exposure fusion even on gigapixels => done. Available with the first preview of 2.5 series

AlexandreJ wrote:

There is some good and bad in both application

We try to improve what is missing in APG to get the best in a single application :

* "Very good is the manual "wysiwyg" cp-editing in PTGui. That would be fine to have in APG." => we're doing that. Available end June.
* exposure fusion even on gigapixels => done. Available with the first preview of 2.5 series

magnificent - grandios - magnifique - 壮丽 -رائع

Aeriscera wrote:

Woot! [Does little dance.]

Yep!! Let´s have a little (sun)dance!

best, Klaus

Hi Aerisera,
I think you will find both have a place in your Pano-image stitching tool kit, as Alexandre said, but have weakness and strengths. I use both and look at them as compliments to each other. Sometimes, Photoshop will do what non of the others will do. One interesting thing in CS5 is the new HDR Pro, where you can select a master image within your series of shots, which can then be used to remove ghosts.

Both are money well spend!

Henrik

Hankkarl,

well, I can't really argue with that :-) yes PS CS5 isn't cheap. However it is mighty useful to have, as none of the pano programs can do pixel manipulation or selective color correction, contrast...etc..

No, lets have a good look at all this, Photoshop should be the first program you buy if you are wanting to work with images, on an overall scale photoshop is able to do almost everything with bitmap images, it may not be the best at specialty tasks such as stitching, HDR, but it is a very strong and improving contender to the top players in each and every field. It will probably be IMHO the best money spend, if you are doing Digital photography (which image stitching is a sub-group of), as it can save you time. (depending on skill level :-), it could also be higher then a mountain to climb)

Yes, there are lessor and cheaper alternatives, which people may prefer, I think  Dr Slony uses GIMP to great success.
When you are familiar with a particular program you may be able to work around its limitation.

I personally use a variety of image related programs to accomplish the task i need, but i have also chosen to make it my living (not always a good living, but an enjoyable one :-) ) so we may be coming from different points of view when we talk image programs.

but to get back to the original topic which was, What's PTGui Like. I offered an alternative in PS CS5, for image stitching. What PTGui can do in one hit, assemble pano's and in particular HDR pano's, what some control over the HDR process, APP can do the same but is currently not able to complete the HDR part of it, In Photoshop you will have to do the HDR first on each set, then do your assemble to get a full picture. Being able to do this for people who makes HDR panorama's in one process is a huge advantage IMHO. APP lets you output your image in multiple files one for each exposure if you set it up to do so, it is currently lacking the better HDR support, which, fingers crossed, we will get soon, which then have to be imported into another program such a Photomatix. However, APP has other advantages that PTGui doesn't have, at least to me, which is the ability to look for pano's in folders and deal with them automatically, its brilliant! :-) just to name one!

None of them are perfect, there are compromises to be made if you choose to only have one program. You just need to be aware of what they are so you can perhaps find a way around it :-)

Digital photography ain't cheap! but its amazing what can be accomplish with very little! and a lot of time :-)

Good luck

Henrik

Last edited by tived (2010-06-05 04:16:26)

Aeriscera wrote:

I just found myself revisiting this thread because I am completely fed up with Autopano's astonishingly bad stitching of images shot with the Gigapan robot so I started wondering about PTGui again ...

May you explain more in details your problem with APG regarding Gigapan shots ? I use it myself with Epic Pro and it works really nice Do you use the import Gigapan filter in Autopano Giga ?

Vincèn

Aeriscera wrote:

vincen wrote:

May you explain more in details your problem with APG regarding Gigapan shots ?

That would be off-topic and I have long since given up reporting this bug. But since you asked nicely, I have submitted two of the 15 examples I came across in the past two days.

Answered you in the other thread

Vincèn